Shadows Unbound
by LordCommanderMilitant
Summary: The Youkai of Darkness is drawn forth and bound instead of Louise's spell's intended target. When the Gandalfr runes overwrite the seal placed upon the bullet-shooting, darkness shrouded, human eating Spirit of the Night's power, the foes of the youngest de Valliere will learn to fear the shadows, for an apparition stalks the night and shrouds herself and master from retribution.
1. Chapter 1: Coming of Night

Hi. I'm back. If you happen to be following my other piece of writing (Inquisitor, Wh40k X MassEffect), I'm still working on that; it isn't dead. My friend proposed this idea because we were playing a D&D game set in a mageocracy, and I was a human sorcerer/noble (the mage=nobility came into effect I used what I called my 'obstructive bureaucrat powers' to 'requisition' some heavy dwarven artillery) and declared war on the elves. While I made the action following Imperium of Man kill-all-xenos philosophy, the situation reminded my friend of Familiar of Zero, (which I will admit to knowing almost nothing about until now) and he suggested I write something FoZ related. I took up the challenge and decided to cross it over with Touhou, because everything can be crossed with Touhou (though I'm really only acquainted with the first Windows game, couldn't get pass the first boss [Rumia] when I played it, and the bullet patterns gave me a headache pretty fast) as a default when one needs something to crossover with. So pardon my ignorance on the subject I'm writing about here; I should have an update for my other one sometime soon.

I own nothing, neither Touhou or Familiar of Zero. They are owned by ZUN and Noboru Yamaguchi, respectively.

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**Tristan Academy of Magic**

Louise Francoise Le Blanc de La Valliere yawned as sunlight streamed into her room at the magic academy. She sighed as she opened her eyes and sat up in her bed. She was nervous for today, as today was the day of the Springtime Summoning Ritual. Today was the day she either proved herself a mage worthy of her lineage or as a failure good only for a political marriage. She desparately hoped it would be the former as she dressed herself.

She soon found herself standing before the summoning circle preparing to summon her servant and lifetime companion. She ignored the jeers and taunts of her classmates as she stepped up and began to chant.

"I, Louise Francoise Le Blanc de La Valliere, in the name of the great Five Pentagon Powers, following my fate, summon a familiar!" she declared, pouring magical power into the circle, which glowed. For a minute, nothing happened. The runes of the circle lit up with the light of stars before changing to the black of the void between them. She supported her spell through sheer force of will, keeping open a portal to worlds far away.

**Gensokyo**

A ball of darkness raced through the woods, chasing after its fleeing target. A young man fled on foot, looking back over his shoulder periodically to see if the sphere which absorbed all light was still following him. All light except for two glowing red points, that is. Blasts of magic struck the ground around him as the sphere's occupant resorted to firing blindly. As fast as he ran, the youkai pursuing him was still gaining on him.

"Come back~" the Youkai of Darkness sung through the brightening forest as she flung patterns of magical rounds ahead of her in the general direction of her prey. Within her bubble of darkness it was pitch black though, and she couldn't see out; she could only locate her prey by the noise he made.

The boy ran and ducked around trees. He had been told that the Night Youkai couldn't see from within her bubble and might collide with a tree allowing his escape. Unfortunately, the scramble of his feet made enough noise that allowed his pursuer to track him as he wove through the woods, allowing her to avoid the trees as well.

A ways in front of him, the boy suddenly saw an unstable green rift in reality tear itself open, like the rifts of the Gap Youkai. He saw his chance, disregarding wherever it may take him, and ran for it. His pursuer chased after him, making a full-speed beeline for him to run him down. He wouldn't make it before the ball of blackness overtook him.

But he saw another opportunity. The blind youkai couldn't know the gap was there and was still bound by the laws of physics. If she was gone, he would effectively be safe from her, despite still being in this strange land of magic. Still running, he ducked as he was enveloped by the black sphere. He felt the wake the youkai occupying the sphere made as she rocketed inches above his ducked head.

In accordance with the law of inertia and mere meters from the portal, the youkai had no time to stop or alter directions before she sailed through it and vanished from Gensokyo. The portal collapsed behind her, having accepted a vague substitute for its intended target.

Saito Hiraga sighed with relief. Lost in the woods, he spotted the sun and followed it, hoping to find a road leading to the human village he had been told about, where he would be safe. He just might survive here, if he didn't run into any of the other creatures he had been warned about before he made it out.

**Tristain Academy of Magic**

The circle Louise had been holding open detonated as the spell collapsed; a wave of eldritch energy washed over the assembled students, who sheltered themselves from the flying debris with their sleeves.

Chunks of dirt and fragments of vegetation flew through the air as the explosion tore a sizable crater out of the ground. The air was filled with smoke and dust. A wind mage dispersed the debris to reveal the object at the center of the crater.

At the epicenter of the blast was a black dome from which no light escaped. At the dome's center were two glowing pinpricks of blood-red light. It was frightening. The young aristocrat stood frozen to the ground as the dust cleared. Slowly, she moved to bind whatever being she had summoned that lived within the sphere of darkness.

"My name is Louise Francoise Le Blanc de La Valliere. Pentagon of the five elemental powers; bless this humble being, and make it my familiar!" she chanted as she pointed her wand at the set of eyes within the black sphere.

She stepped forward into the sphere slowly to complete the ritual, unsure of what she might find.

Within the darkness, she stumbled across a body lying on the ground.

"A human?" She thought in passing, but any concern she had was overridden by her fear of the blackness.

Frightened from her inability to see, she quickly kissed the first part of the body she could grab, a hand, sealing the contract. She ran from the sphere as fast as she could as a second point of light, indicating the familiar runes' formation, lit up within the dome of darkness.

The runes worked their way through their victim's mind, attempting to overwrite priorities to prepare the familiar to serve its master. They encountered something else. A warding, something holding back the being's power. The powerful seal fought with the familiar rune's over the unconscious but healing youkai.

The magic of the runes was like a sledgehammer; the seal was like an ornate cage. The unrefined magical power of the runes slammed into the seal as if they had a mind of their own, trying to overwrite the specially crafted block.

Louise felt the spell drawing on more and more of her magical reserves as it tried to break down the wall. She let the magic flow, desperate to succeed, unwary of the consequences. The tide of magical energy began to back up against the dam holding back the Youkai of the Dusk's power. The youkai's cage was split open by the brute force of the runes, the complex magical seals shattering and releasing the eventually frightening power they had safely locked away from their owner.

Onto the ground within the darkness fell a red ribbon, and the Youkai Who Hides in the Darkness arose, powers no longer fettered by the magical amulet placed upon her long ago. She grasped the fallen ribbon in her hand and floated into the air.

The black sphere rose up and seemed to expand. Students panicked, the professor readied his weapon to attack the black sphere if something went wrong. Another teacher tried to shepherd the students indoor as away from the rising and slowly growing mass of black. Louise stood rooted to the ground in fear before the darkness began to expand, encompassing the academy and continuing to spread.

In the darkness, she was blind. She could hear the panic of the others as they were enveloped by the area where light could not pass. Magelights were of no use, the darkness swallowed their feeble light before eyes could see it. The only light allowed to penetrate the darkness was that of the youkai's glowing red eyes.

She willed herself to see, to sense anything through the darkness. She focused on the red eyes of what must be her familiar and tried to navigate using them as a lighthouse in the night, doing her best to make a mental picture of the courtyard relative to her familiar. She wondered what sort of familiar could project a field that absorbed all light, why it would have eyes in such darkness, what it could see with its glowing eyes.

Louise suddenly realized that the blackness seemed to have partially cleared for her. It was no longer the inky black field, but now just seemed to be a dark grey tint placed on everything. She could see professors and students panicking and stumbling about blindly, she could see herself standing and staring at her with a curious expression.

"Wait, is that me?" she thought.

She moved her arm. It looked odd from the third person perspective hovering in the air. She took a tentative step in the blackness, watching herself walk towards her point of view.

"Hello~" she heard a childish voice from both her viewpoint and straight in front of her. "I can see!" the voice repeated, excitedly.

She stopped to think about it. Suddenly, her viewpoint began to move towards her body.

"Who are you?" her viewpoint declared as it inspected her.

Then it suddenly dawned on her, she was seeing the world through her familiar's eyes, those glowing red pinpricks she had seen in the dark! She had subconsciously piggybacked on her familiar's senses when her own were rendered useless by the darkness and she wondered what her familiar saw. When she thought about it, she stopped subconsciously feeding the spell supporting the magical sharing of senses, and her vision returned to blackness.

"I am Louise Francoise Le Blanc de La Valliere, noblewoman of the Kingdom of Tristain, and your master, familiar!" she answered her familiar's question.

"Is that so? I am Rumia, Youkai of the Shadows!" the child's voice declared cheerfully.

"Familiar! Are you the source of this darkness?" Louise asked.

"Yes! My seal is gone, I can see, I am powerful!" Rumia declared, still cheerful.

"Dispel this darkness, for I cannot!" the noblewoman commanded.

"No! I like the dark! I am strong in the dark!" her stomach gurgled as she realized her prey had escaped earlier, and her childish mind changed tracks to thoughts of food and sleep. "I'm hungry; and tired."

Louise could see the pinpricks of red light circling her slowly. She changed tactics.

"Dispel the darkness and I will feed you."

"I can hunt on my own, now that I can see! And I like the dark." Rumia declared, and turned to move towards the panicking crowd trying to find their way indoors.

"Then make your darkness smaller so the rest of us can see!" Louise ordered as she willed her familiar to obey.

The familiar runes had done their job imperfectly, but worked, and the youkai acquiesced.

"Okay~"

The darkness shrunk until it formed a human-sized sphere around Louise's familiar, the bright light that replaced it suddenly blinding the students and teachers.

"Now may I eat?"

"Follow me. I'll have a servant bring you some food."

"I want meat~"

"You can have meat, but come with me first."

Louise noticed her professor, the only person who hadn't made it inside, walking up to her as she headed for the door, familiar in tow.

"Excuse me, Miss Valliere, may I see the runes on your familiar?"

"No," Rumia declared.

"I need to record them."

"No."

"Familiar, show him the runes. They should be on one of your hands."

Rumia sighed and shrunk her bubble further so as to allow her hands to stick out.

"Interesting," the professor mumbled as he wrote the runes burned into the familiar's hands down before the youkai restored her bubble of darkness to its normal size.

He ran off to meet with the headmaster, as students filtered back outside, shaken by the darkness that had enveloped the area earlier and wishing to avoid it not that it had moved into the hall, leaving Louise and her familiar alone.

"May I eat now?"

Louise sighed and called to a maid running errand or another.

"You! Bring my familiar some food! Meat of some sort!"

"Yes my lady," the servant replied and scurried off to do the noble girl's bidding.

"Familiar, while we wait for the maid to bring you your food, show yourself to me."

"When it is dark~" Rumia declared in her childish sing-song that was starting to irritate Louise.

It didn't take long for the maid to return with a large chunk of raw meat; she was frightened of whatever both the notoriously volatile noblewoman and the eyes in the darkness would do to her if they became impatient.

"Here you go my lady," the servant placed the tray on a table and ran away as fast as she could.

The youkai moved over to the tray, obscuring it within her ball of darkness, and began inhaling its contents. Louise heard greedy sounds as her familiar consumed the chunk of raw meat, disregarding the presence of bones; making sickening cracking sounds as she chewed through the brittle mineralized tissue.

"By Brimir, what exactly is this familiar?" she thought to herself.

Despite having a passing resemblance to human body structure, she knew of no human mage who could project such a field of absolute darkness. In addition, nobody ever had glowing red eyes.

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Well that's chapter one of this experiment. Was it okay? Next chapter promises violence of some sort.


	2. Chapter 2: The First Midnight

This is proving shorter, probably because I have much less experience with Touhou and FoZ than Warhammer 40k and Mass Effect.

I own nothing, neither Touhou or Familiar of Zero. They are owned by ZUN and Noboru Yamaguchi, respectively. I also don't own Into The Woods, from which this chapter and the next take their titles.

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**Tristain Academy of Magic**

Louise woke up sweating. She had thought she heard screaming in the night. She had also been having a terrible dream.

She dreamt she had been flying through the halls of the academy in the night, arms outstretched. She had rounded a corner to see Guiche flirting with a first year. He had his back to her. The first year had seen her and screamed, drawing her wand. Guiche had spun about on his feet, drawing his own as well.

She had felt a trickle of magic flowing within her; it manifested itself as a series of thin glowing lines that crisscrossed the hall. The magic flow intensified as if a floodgate had been opened, and massive beams of magic shot out from her towards the blonde boy and brown haired girl. The girl had leapt and pushed the boy to the ground. As she jumped through the energy beam, it sawed off both her legs. She had lain on the floor, wounds cauterized by the intense energy, as Guiche stood up.

"I, Guiche the Bronze, will avenge my heroic love Katie, daemon! Prepare to perish!"

"Is that so?"

She realized it was her familiar speaking. She couldn't turn her head in the dream, but it must have been somewhere behind her.

Guiche had, in the darkness of the hall, conjured up at least 10 of his bronze golems with a flick of his rose-wand. Louise had felt fear, but her viewpoint in her dream had acted in response, floating higher into the air and firing off a spread of magical glowing projectiles. The glowing balls of energy had crept along towards Guiche, who simply sidestepped them, along with his golems. The animated bronze had lunged for her, swinging swords that slashed past her. One had buried itself in her body, spreading pain like fire, but within moments she had healed and there was no sign of the wound.

"Oooh! Doll-master's doll hurts, but can't hurt me!"

She had then realized that she was dreaming from her familiar's point of view. Apparently, the master-familiar bond caused the sharing of dreams. But how would it have known Guiche's capabilities? Was it seeing a part of her mind too? The idea of whatever-it-was poking about in her mind frightened her.

In her dream, after the initial attack, her familiar had intensified its spreads of magical bullets, forcing Guiche and his golems to dodge increasingly excessive numbers of unaimed, slow moving projectiles. One golem was hit as its master's concentration was disrupted; the bullet left the portion that it hit a molten puddle of bronze slag.

The familiar had begun to intersperse energy beams into its attacks as well. Nothing seemed to be aimed, an nothing seemed to penetrate the walls, though the attacks left burn marks. Guiche didn't seem to be having a particularly difficult time dodging the attacks in her dream, but it forced him to stop concentrating on the golems.

His bronze golems were reduced to slag one by one as they were struck by the random bolts of magical energy. The blonde boy conjured up a sword as his final defense as the familiar closed upon him. He swung his sword wildly, cutting into the familiar. Louise felt Rumia's momentary pain as the sword buried itself in her side before it subsided as the youkai healed.

"My ribbon is undone. I can make swords too!" she declared.

The darkness of the night flowed to the youkai's will, shaping itself into a bastard sword of pure black. The cross-shaped hilt of the blade was engraved with shining red writing that matched the familiar's eyes. With the superhuman strength of a youkai, Rumia swung the blade with both hands down upon the student.

The bastard sword of shadow clashed with the rapier of bronze, but made no sound as it hit against Guiche's parry five and the bell guard of his blade. The runes engraved on the spirit's hand glowed a sickening red to match her eyes as she swung the blade. They weren't fully effective, but they augmented the spirit's already exceptional speed and strength.

The force of the downward strike broke through the bronze of Guiche's sword, but the son of a general had already jumped back away from the youkai's sword.

He restored his sword, reconstructing the blade with conjured bronze, and counterattacked with a lunge, stabbing the point of his rapier into Rumia's gut. The blade cut through the spirit's skin and drove itself through her up to its hilt. She flew backwards off the blade, ignoring the excruciating pain thanks to the familiar runes, and floated up to the ceiling of the hallway

The familiar hovered up near the ceiling and fired a spread of shots downward. Then she dove after them, and as Guiche dodged, kicked him in the head, knocking him unconscious. His girlfriend screamed. The youkai clamped her hand over the screaming girl's mouth, silencing her.

In Louise's dream, Rumia had then dragged the two back to the tristanian noble's room and set them down in a corner. The girl began screaming again.

Then she bit through the screaming girl's neck. The spirit of darkness ripped out the first year's trachea in her mouth, ending her frantic screams that threatened to wake Louise and end the youkai's meal.

At that point, Louise had awoken in cold sweats. She looked about in the darkness for her familiar. The only sound in the darkness was the sickening crunching of bones; Louise was suddenly unsure if the screaming was actually real or imagined in her dream. Was it really a dream? The consequences that would come if her familiar had actually dragged off and killed Guiche and Katie would be disastrous. Her familiar was nocturnal, so it wasn't unlikely she had been out prowling in the night and Louise had simply dreamt what her familiar has seen.

"Familiar?"

"Yes?" the youkai replied with her mouth full.

The red light of one of Halkegenia's moon slightly illuminated the room and the youkai's sphere of darkness had partially dissipated in the night.

Louise found herself staring at a young girl, definitely younger than she was. The girl had blonde hair and ghostly white skin. She was wearing a white shirt with a black vest over it, accompanied by a black skirt. She had on a red tie. She would have been rather adorable if it weren't for her glowing red daemonic eyes, pinpricks of menacing light in the darkness, and the gore that was smeared across her mouth and collar and matted in her hair.

Rumia was sitting in a puddle of blood, torn flesh, and bone. She held what appeared to be a portion of a spine in her hand, having been chewing on the end of it. She smiled at her master, revealing her blood-stained razor-sharp teeth and a mouthful of crushed up bone and flesh

"Familiar, what are you eating?" Louise was frightened to find out the answer to her question.

"Katie!" Rumia declared cheerfully, drooling a little trickle of blood out of the corner of her mouth onto her shirt.

Louise fainted. Rumia shrugged and continued her meal, licking the accumulated gore off her face and clothes.

Louise was awakened again when the screaming resumed. Guiche had regained consciousness in indescribable pain as he was disemboweled alive by the youkai, who hadn't realized she should kill him before trying to eat him.

Louise looked at Rumia, who was sitting atop the writhing boy's chest with a portion of his small intestine in her mouth. The long organ was still attached to his body, but had been partially unraveled and was spilling out of the hole the spirit had torn in him. She was sucking the organ into her mouth like it was a long noodle.

"Familiar! Stop!" Louise commanded.

Rumia bit through the piece of Guiche she had in her mouth as she turned to look at Louise again, letting the two pieces of it fall into her lap, spilling gore across her clothes.

Louise steeled herself.

"Familiar! Why are you eating Guiche?"

"I'm hungry. Youkai eat humans." Rumia shrugged.

Guiche had mentally overcome his pain, and, with shaky hand, had again conjured his sword of bronze. He maneuvered it around and plunged the point into the spirit's back. The point struck straight through her chest, piercing her heart. The spirit slumped forward atop Guiche, tipping over. Her face landed in the gory hole in Guiche's abdomen.

Gritting his teeth against the pain, the blonde boy steadied his sword at Louise, sitting up in bed, shocked.

"Your familiar," he began, "you are accountable for her actions. The staff will come, we made such a ruckus they couldn't fail to hear somewhere. When they come, Zero, you will not be spared. Your lineage won't help you escape justice; the evidence is manifest, even if I die before they come. You have murdered a fellow noble, and mortally wounded another! You will be tried, found guilty, and be fittingly executed."

He conjured up two golems in her room. One rolled the mostly dead youkai off of him and pinned her to the floor with a spear through her chest. The other stood guard over Guiche's body, also ready to strike Louise if she tried to run.

The noble girl was frightened. She knew the sentence for murder was death. There was no way she could hide the evidence. She would die for this.

The runes engraved on the hand of the mostly dead youkai glowed. As a spirit, she couldn't really die, and would recover from all but the most severe of injuries. The runes augmented her impressive healing, and her eyes flicked open again. The mists of darkness began to accumulate around her as she returned to consciousness pinned to the floor by a spear. She was in excruciating pain, but the runes marginally deadened it.

She channeled her magical power and again shaped the darkness into a pitch black sword, a preference imparted by the runes. She lifted her free arm and gripped the shaft of the bronze spear that held her to the ground. With visible effort, she pulled hard, pulling herself along the shaft of the spear. She slammed her bastard sword up to its hilt in the golem, the shadow blade tearing through the metal and crushing the golem.

"You! You should be dead daemon!"

Guiche called forth more golems to defend him as the one standing guard lunged for Louise.

Rumia ripped the spear out of her chest.

"Is that so?"

Louise rolled to the side, trying to dodge the golem's strike. The blade sank into her shoulder, spilling her blood across the sheets of her bed. She dropped onto the bed and the golem raised its sword to finish her. As the bronze sword came down on the noble girl's neck, it was met mere centimeters from her skin by the black blade of the Youkai of Darkness. The runes had compelled her to defend her master at all costs. With a flick of the menacing blade, the golem was cut in half and fell onto the bed beside Louise.

Louise rolled out of bed and landed on her feet as two more golems detached from Guiche's bodyguard to attack her. Their blades cut into her mattress where she had been mere moments ago. She saw several golems attacking her familiar in the corner of the room. Despite its ghastly nature, it had saved her.

Only one golem stood guard over Guiche now. Two were moving to strike Louise, four were attacking Rumia.

The youkai ignored the ones that stabbed her with their swords and melted a golem that was moving for Louise with a beam of magical energy. A blade pinned each of her outstretched arms to the wall, driving through her palms. She looked at herself for a moment in contemplation as she searched her memories for significant information.

"This is how the saint was crucified," she declared.

"Daemon, you are no saint! Valkyries, kill it!" Guiche grunted out through his pain.

A golem drove its blade through the youkai's chest and twisted it, trying to kill the spirit of the shadows. Rumia cried out pitifully as the bronze sword was twisted in the wound, severing the aortic bridge, only for the vital artery to repair itself.

Louise ducked beneath the swung sword of the golem attacking her. It moved slow and jerkily, as the concentration Guiche required to continuously control it was being disrupted by his pain and continuous efforts to kill the youkai. It spun around to strike her again, lunging at her with the rapier-point. The point drove between two ribs as she tried to dodge the weapon, mixing her blood with Guiche, Katie, and Rumia's on the floor.

She groaned in pain and made a decision in the instant, influenced by the pitiful cries of her familiar and the pain from her stab wounds. She didn't care any longer about the consequences, he had attacked her first. She leveled her wand straight at the blonde boy's head, supporting herself on a bedpost as the golem swung its sword to finish her off, and cast the only thing she knew how to do.

"Explosion."

Moments before her head was removed by the bronze blade of the golem, Guiche's head and upper body vanished in a massive explosion. Fragments of bone, bits of gore, bronze shrapnel, and blood sprayed through the room, splattering the door, walls, bed, wardrobes, ceiling, floor, and windows, not to mention the combatants.

Its controller gone, the golem attacking Louise froze, its blade mere centimeters from her neck. The lower half of the golem that had been defending Guiche had been obliterated; it's upper half was a crumpled wreck of bronze on the floor. Louise gingerly pushed the golem in front of her, and it toppled to the floor with a crash. It had absorbed the shrapnel from the exploding golem that defended Guiche; its back was riddled with holes like Swiss cheese.

She looked at her familiar, who had freed herself from the golems and had sat down against the wall to lick the blood off her face. The sphere of darkness was reappearing as daylight slowly began to dawn. She looked at Guiche's mutilated corpse, then at her own hand, as it dawned on her the full magnitude of her deed.

She heard a thumping on her door, which had been barred shut, and panicked. Thoughts of the horrible things that might happen to her filled her head. The magical connection caused Rumia to pick up on this fear; she looked up from consuming Guiche's arm. Louise decided to flee. She grabbed a candle and her notebooks off the night table and lit it with a fire starter she kept for the simple fact that she couldn't light it with magic.

"Familiar, do your darkness sphere thing over the room!"

Rumia complied, and the room was shrouded in pure blackness. The candle didn't help light the familiar's darkness at all, so Louise discarded the candle onto the bed and grabbed her familiar's wrist with her left hand, and, with her wand in her right hand and notebooks tucked beneath her arm, blew out the window of the room, exposing it to the dawning sky several stories above the ground. The flame caught the bed sheets and the room began to fill with smoke.

"You can fly, right?"

"Yes!"

"Then hold onto me and jump out the window!"

Rumia grabbed Louise in the darkness and leaped out the window, taking flight.

The natural levitation of the youkai had trouble supporting the two of them, but Louise was light enough and the two disappeared into the darkness of the early morning, shrouded in Rumia's ball of shadow.

**Tristain Academy of Magic, Girl's Dormitory**

As the sun rose, it found several maids and almost the entire female population of the academy as well as some boys, standing outside the door to Louise de Valliere's room. They had been awakened by ungodly amounts of screaming, followed by several explosions. They had been pounding on the barred door for quite some time.

Kirche kicked the stubbornly sealed door. The door and surrounding flame were hot to the touch, she deduced that there must be a fire in the room. It had resisted being burned down by her fire magic. Tabitha had tried and failed to break the door as well.

"Make way!" came a cry from the back of the crowd.

Students moved aside to let a professor, wielding an axe, come running down the hall.

"There's a fire in there! Evacuate! Move!" another professor cried out.

Students began to panic and some fled down the stairs. Others tried to run back to their dorm rooms to grab their personal belongings and familiars. Overall, the crowd made no progress in leaving the hall.

"Move you fools! You'll be incinerated! Your stuff doesn't matter, just get out!"

Teachers and maids began to force the crowd down the stairs and out of the building. Professor Colbert, a fire mage, swung his fire axe against the door. The firefighting axe, meant to shatter the doors which had been warded against magical damage, splintered the wooden door, revealing the inferno that Louise's room had become. The wooden floor, the bed, the table, the stack of hay that had been hauled up for the student's familiar, the wardrobe, everything was aflame. The fire sucked air in through the gaping hole in the wall.

The inflow forced the flames down the hall, which moments before had held a crowd of students who had now moved out to the courtyard. A water mage projected a stream of water down the hall, stalling the flames, but the thick smoke surrounded her and she began to cough.

Professor Colbert raced into the flaming room to search for living bodies. Finding none, he hastily cast Levitation on himself and leaped out the hole in the wall.

Outside the students assembled in the courtyard could see the plume of smoke that poured out of the window of the room. They saw someone leap out of the window and drop to the ground.

"The Zero's really done it this time, hasn't she," commented a student who recognized the location the smoke was coming from.

The floor of the burning room gave out and dropped down onto the floor below, spreading the inferno into the first year's dorms.

"Water Mages, everyone, we need all hands to contain the fire!" Professor Colbert called out as he landed.

The student body leaped into action, some water mages did their best to move, project or otherwise manipulate water to fight the fire. Some students ran back into the building to help the staff. Maids and non-water aligned students formed a bucket brigade to haul water up to the room.

After hours of firefighting the flames had been extinguished. The dirty, tired, and disgruntled student body assembled in the courtyard for roll call. Their faces were streaked with soot, their shirts soaked with sweat from the head of the flames and the sun, which had risen high into the sky. They were sore from hauling buckets of water, or magically drained from manipulating water nearly continuously. They were annoyed by having to do work that should have rightfully been done by commoners beneath them.

Teachers called roll to the assembled students, and found 3 missing.

"I think I saw Guiche run into the fire to save people!" a student shouted out.

"The Zero's room is where the fire started! She probably burned up!" another offered.

"Katie probably didn't make it out. Her room was beneath the Zero's."

The students murmured amongst themselves while the teachers search the charred first and second year girls' dorms for bodies.

Old Osmond's secretary came running through the main gate.

"The Vault's been broken into! The fire was a distraction!"

The teachers returned from the search for bodies having found nothing, but they concluded that any corpses would have been completely incinerated by the heat.

"Are you saying this is arson?"

"Yes! Fouquet started the fire to create a distraction!"

"Then why did it start in de Valliere's room?"

"There's a big hole in the wall! He broke open a hole in the tower and tossed in a torch before heading to the vault!"

The headmaster entered the field.

"How do you know this? We need to organize a searching party"

"I followed him! I don't know what he stole, but I saw him leaving and tracked him through the woods."

"Why didn't you sound the alarm?"

"Because everyone was busy fighting the fire!"

The headmaster sighed, "Very well, organize a search party and recover what he stole. I have to write letters to some families and organize repairs. Classes are cancelled."

The headmaster of the school retired to his chamber, the students dispersed to the rest of the academy, and a task group of teachers, organized by Ms. Longueville, departed the gates to seek out the thief.

**Forest, Nearby the Academy of Magic**

Rumia set Louise down near an abandoned cottage in the woods.

"Familiar, where are we?" the runaway noble girl asked as she staggered out of the bubble of darkness into the light of early morning.

"Dunno. I saw a house. I'm sleepy."

Louise hadn't received a sufficient amount of sleep that night and agreed with the youkai's sentiment. Without a regard for safety, the master and familiar entered the abandoned building and went to sleep on the bed. Louise was too tired, nervous, and disturbed to complain when the spirit of darkness curled up next to her.

* * *

Second chapter of this shorter story. How far off mark am I with characterizations?


	3. Chapter 3: Into the Woods

And a return to the normal plot of FoZ fanfics with the trip to Albion. Back to work on my usual fanfic (Inquisitor) now. Probably.

I own nothing, neither Touhou or Familiar of Zero. They are owned by ZUN and Noboru Yamaguchi, respectively.

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**Abandoned Cottage, Near the Academy**

Louise and Rumia were rudely awakened by a pounding on the door a little after midday.

"Fouquet! We know you're in there and have the premise surrounded! Come out and you won't be hurt!"

"They found us!" Louise whispered, "We have to get away!"

Suddenly, outside they heard a massive crash, followed by screams.

"By Brimir, where did that come from?"

"Bring it down!"

The crackle of magic filled the air.

Louise took advantage of the confusion and blasted a hole in the wall of the cottage where the window had been boarded over.

"Familiar! Carry me again!"

The childish youkai complied and rushed over to pick up her master. A teacher from the academy had noticed the explosion of the wall being blown out and turned to attack. She began to chant a spell as the blob of darkness appeared in the opening.

"Dodge!"

Suddenly, the teacher was impaled on a spike of rock that imbedded itself in the ground.

As Rumia took flight carrying Louise, the noble could see two teachers fighting with a large golem. Flames and spears of earth attacked the construct as it tried to pound them to dust. It swung a tree like a club, carving out trenches in the ground as it struck. Spikes of stone shot from its body, but they were nimbly dodged by their tiny targets.

The teachers danced around the construct as it tried in vain to hit them. Its size was its biggest disadvantage; it couldn't turn quickly or was flexible enough to hit its targets. They chipped away at the golem, damaging it slowly.

The mage controlling it could be seen from above riding on the construct's shoulder. She held onto a handhold she had created as the large mass of rock lurched beneath her.

Louise heard a dragon's cry from behind and above her. She couldn't see out of Rumia's darkness bubble, but she could assume that Tabitha and Kirche had shown up to join the fray.

"Familiar! Stay in the trees!"

Rumia complied and dove into the woods, weaving between tree trunks holding onto Louise. Hiding in the trees, she effectively lost any possible pursuers. They could still hear the sound of battle behind them, but the youkai sped through the trees away from the fight and soon the battle had faded into the distance.

"These woods are surrounded by farmlands and roads. If we keep going straight, we should be able to make it to safety."

"Which way?"

"Any direction, familiar."

"This way!"

Still carrying Louise, Rumia spun around in the air and shot off in a random direction. For at least an hour, the youkai kept a straight course skimming just above the tree tops. Louise didn't know where they were going, only that they were escaping eventual retribution for the murder of her fellow classmates. As she was carried along in the darkness, she realized she should have tried to defer the blame or make it seem as if she was simply defending herself and Guiche was the one at fault.

Now she was on the run with nowhere to go; she had eluded the first search party thanks to the timely intervention of the golem, she must thank that person if he survived and they ever met again, but there would inevitably be more. The murder of the children of two noble families, especially a famous general, does not go unnoticed or unpunished.

Now that she thought about it, the golem had no purpose being there, and she knew of no person who would try to help her escape, or who knew about her crime, besides her strange familiar. Why would the golem's owner even try to help her? Conspiracies drifted about in her mind as she pondered this strange dilemma.

She was jolted from her frantic worrying by sudden lateral acceleration. Her familiar had begun to spin in the air and weave rapidly from left to right. She heard the crack of musket fire and the rumble of carriage wheels below her, but couldn't see what was happening.

Rumia shot into the air away from the treetops, she had overflown a road she hadn't seen and a passing carriage had noticed her. Obviously panicked guards on the carriage began to open fire, as a flying ball of darkness in the late afternoon can never be a good thing. She was trying to get above the incoming musket fire. She dodged past flying musket balls as they sliced the air around her.

"Familiar, what's happening?"

"The cart is shooting at me!"

"What?"

"The cart! There are people on it shooting at me!"

"What cart? I can't see out of your darkness!"

"The cart on the road!"

Louise, exasperated and worried, tried to see with her familiar's sight. Down below she could see an ornate carriage stranded on the road as its driver tried to regain control of panicked horses. A fireteam of musketeers stood around it, firing their weapons into the sky at her. Had the word already spread and the royal musketeers been dispatched to seek her out? Usually their reaction time was painfully slow for a guard force and they would never be sent out except to guard the queen and princess, but a general may have been able to pull some strings in government to mobilize forces not normally afforded to pursuit tasks.

"Attack! You can make a sword and shoot magic at them, right familiar?"

"Should I drop you?"

"No! Put me down somewhere first!"

The youkai rolled over in the air like a SBD Dauntless and dove on the carriage. The wind ripped through Louise's hair and nightclothes as her familiar rocketed towards the ground approaching terminal velocity. She shivered.

Suddenly, she felt as if her innards were thrown to her head as Rumia rapidly decelerated and pulled out of her dive at over 10 g's of acceleration. Louise suddenly felt her familiar release her from her hold.

She fell for a moment, and screamed. Then she hit something hard; the impact knocked the wind out of her. Her momentum carried her through the surface, which splintered beneath her, and she dropped onto a lumpy object. She was blinded by the sudden exposure to light, and deafened by the roar of the wind moments before. She felt the rumble of carriage wheels through her prone body, and, as her hearing and vision returned, was confronted with the panicked yells of soldiers and the report of musketry. She had been dropped through the roof of the carriage.

An explosion sounded, the carriage lurched beneath her. She heard a musketeer scream as magical bullets burned through him above her.

"Louise?"

Someone was saying her name.

"Are you okay?

She blinked, clearing her vision, and found herself staring into the face of her childhood friend. She gathered her wits quickly.

"Sorry my princess!" she hastily apologized, "Don't hurt me! I haven't done anything!"

"Agnes! Put your gun away or point it somewhere useful, like that thing that is attacking us!"

"That's probably my familiar! Sorry, don't hurt me, I'll stop her!"

Another guard was vaporized by a hail of magical bullets. He screamed as he was burned up alive.

Louise stood up in the stalled carriage.

"Familiar! Call off your attack!" she shouted at the sky.

Since she hadn't been arrested yet and it was carrying the princess, the carriage must not have been out searching for her, so she figured she'd give them no reason to suspect what she'd done.

Rumia heard Louise's order and ceased her firing upon the guards, but continued to hover over the carriage.

"That evil thing is your familiar?"

"She isn't evil!"

"It's a cloud of absolute darkness with glowing red eyes! By Brimir how can it not be evil!" Agnes interrupted, "My princess, I recommend you not trust her!"

"She's some sort of 'Youkai of the Shadows,' I summoned her in my familiar summoning ritual!"

"Do you know what 'youkai' means, child?"

"Umm…no? I think it means she's a spirit, like water spirits and air spirits, just one that lives in the dark."

"Agnes, stop abusing my friend. Her familiar is a unique creature in its own right, and probably is a night spirit. I'm sure you don't know what 'youkai' means either."

"Yes your majesty, but she was still dropped in here by a daemon that attacked my men; how do we know she's telling the truth?"

"She isn't a daemon! She's a shadow spirit!" Louise decided her familiar was a spirit. That would explain her humanoid appearance but inhuman power and abilities. It cheered her up slightly to think she summoned a divine being.

"How do you know it's female? It's a blob of blackness with eyes! How does it even have a gender? And I'm still not convinced it isn't evil, it killed some of my men."

"She looks like a little girl! She's just surrounded by the cloud of darkness she lives in! It goes away at night."

Henrietta changed the subject: "Anyway, what brings you out here away from the Academy? We were heading there for the Familiar Exhibition. I guess I got a preview of yours!" she laughed.

Louise found herself having to come up with a believable excuse. If she could convince the princess of the veracity of a false version of the events, she might dismiss the others' claims as fantasy or conspiracy.

"There was an attack," she half-told the truth, figuring the carnage she caused might be evidence supporting her tale. "The window of my room was destroyed. I was frightened; I grabbed my familiar and she flew us away into the woods. We got lost in the woods and found a small house; but we were attacked there as well. We've been flying around all afternoon. The academy is probably looking for me."

"The academy was attacked? Who would do so?"

"I don't know. I ran before the dawn and couldn't see."

"Maybe it was that thief that has been striking noble houses. Fouquet of the Crumbling Dirt," Agnes offered, unknowingly coming to the same false conclusion that Fouquet herself caused the academy staff to come to.

"That's awful! Why would he attack the academy?"

"There are many valuable relics in the academy vaults."

"Oh. Anyways, Louise, I was also going to visit you personally. I have a favor to request of you. Agnes, can I trust you to keep a secret?"

"Yes my princess."

"What do you want, your highness?"

"First of all, call me Henrietta, just like old times. Second, you probably know that I'm to marry Emperor of Germaina to solidify an alliance against the Reconquista in Albion. Except that I was previously in love with Prince Wales of Albion. I sent him a letter, which the Reconquista could use to break up our potential marriage, which would be disastrous."

"And you want me to recover it."

"I want you to destroy it. Since you've disappeared from the Academy, we can make them think you died so that nobody questions your disappearance to infiltrate Albion."

Louise didn't approve of Henrietta's plan to marry the Germanian, but she understood the necessity and wouldn't disobey a request from her princess.

"Of course, Henrietta."

She recognized the use of sending her, as opposed to Agnes or someone else who would inevitably be better trained. This way, if she was caught, Tristain could deny any affiliation with the Reconquista to keep their hands clean, yet she could be trusted enough to actually complete the mission and not defect once she had the letter.

The princess climbed out of the carriage and unlocked a case that was on the roof. She withdrew a sealed envelope.

"Give this to Wales, he'll give you the letter. You'll need this as well," she gave Louise the ring off her finger, "and these are papers for passage on a ship to Albion. Nobody else should know about this mission, now or in the future; its secret should die with you. We'll take care of covering for your absence. Agnes can ride you to the port."

"Your majesty! What if you get attacked?"

"I can't risk informing any more people. I'll be fine, the Academy is well guarded. Plus, a thief never strikes the same place twice. Go, this is urgent. Good luck, Louise, and come back alive!"

Agnes commandeered a horse from a musketeer who had been escorting the carriage, and gestured for Louise to ride with her. Louise climbed on the steed behind the musketeer captain.

"Familiar! Follow us and stay out of sight!"

Off they rode, tailed by the ball of darkness, as Henrietta continued on her way to the Academy.

* * *

These chapters are much shorter. Anyone got any ideas for how the Citadel Council would react to a planet-cracking exterminatus of Omega? I might include reaction ideas.

I requisitioned myself a new Manticore, and am excited for the upcoming IG update. I hear there is a new Basilisk-Medusa-Griffon-Colossus (or some combination thereof) kit coming, plus a veterans box for infantry. I kind of want to see Marcharius tanks in our lineup as heavy tanks, because I love the way they look as a battle tank, low profile, none of that stupid lozenge nonesense, machineguns instead of main-line tank guns in their hull mount, and they remind me of WWII tanks more than the good old Leman Russ (I love WWII tanks. Particularly the IS-2. I wish I could have one to drive around). Not that I don't like the Leman Russ, but I just really like the Marcharius Vanquisher model and would buy one if I could use it in normal games. I also like the Ragnarok tank from the fluff, it looks like a KV-2 assault gun, which are rather adorable as far as self-propelled field artillery goes. For those of you who play WoT, a KV-2 is an assault gun meant to break bunkers by providing infantry with close support and cover fire, not a heavy tank! Admittedly, it got used as one though; the Soviets needed everything they could get and there wasn't a pressing need for an assault gun like that. The SU-152 and ISU-152 were field artillery as well, desgined later to fill the same role as the KV-2, close artillery support for advancing infantry, though in a pinch they were brought in to break open PZ-5 and PZ-6 tanks, since their gunw as so damn good. (WoT bugs me by classifying KV-2 as heavy tank and ISU/SU-152 as tank destroyer, when they were actually artillery pieces meant to provide direct fire support. I understand why, Wargaming only wanted to give the "artillery" class to vehicles that performed indirect artillery support fire, but why _tank destroyer_!)


	4. Chapter 4: Without Delay

(_Into the woods/Without delay/__But careful not/To lose the way./Into the woods/Who knows what may/Be lurking on the journey?_)

I think I failed at proofreading this chapter. Not sure how many errors, but I feel sure there are some.

I own nothing, neither Touhou or Familiar of Zero. They are owned by ZUN and Noboru Yamaguchi, respectively. I also don't own Into the Woods.

* * *

**Port of La-Rochelle**

Louise walked through the nighttime streets of the port. Agnes had ridden through the night and following day to reach the city in a timely fashion and had dropped Louise off at the harbor. The sun was still below the horizon, but morning was coming and the airships were preparing to leave. Crew scuttled about on their riggings and operated cranes as the ships took on loads to ferry to far off places.

The noble girl had he paperwork that would get her aboard one discreetly bound for the Albion Royalists, but she needed to find which one. She had also been given a set of clothing and armor by Agnes, a dark colored dress that preserved her mobility and concealed the dress of chain mail she wore beneath it, over her nightclothes. It simultaneously served the purpose of allowing her to blend into the darkness when required, protect her from attacks if discovered, and allow her to still appear noble and blend into the crowd.

Her familiar followed her through the shadows, practically invisible unless someone unwary was to walk into the youkai. In that case, they wouldn't have a chance to cry for help, Louise thought grimly to the events that put her in this situation.

"My dear Louise! I've been looking for you!" she heard a voice from behind her call.

She spun about, about to sic her ravenous familiar on the arrival. Her familiar hadn't eaten recently, and probably was eventually going to jump somebody sooner or later. If she ate like a human, with 3 meals a day, Louise's will was probably the only thing keeping Rumia from jumping an unsuspecting passerby to satisfy her disturbing eating habits.

Fortunately, youkai do not need to eat nearly as frequently as humans do, and the Youkai of Darkness was still content with her earlier meal that had placed Louise in this position in the first place.

"I've been sent to escort you on your mission. The princess had second thoughts, and didn't want you to go alone."

Louise was speechless. While she was glad to see her fiancé, Jean-Jacques de Wardes, he created a puzzling situation. First of all, Henrietta had told her nobody else was to know about her secret mission to Albion. Second, as she understood it, she was being sent because she wasn't a member of Tristain's military or higher government, thus allowing Tristain to distance itself from the incident if she was caught. Sending the captain of the Griffin Knights seemed contrary to this plan.

The only way this could make sense was if he was actually a spy for the enemy, and in that case, how had he learned about her mission? Plus, as the captain of one of Tristain's most elite military organizations, why would he betray his country? She would test him to see what he knew and if all information checked out.

"Very well, I didn't want to go alone. What sort of briefing have you had on the nature of this assignment?"

"Very little. I was told that you were catching a ship at La-Rochelle and to serve as your escort to your destination. The mission itself was withheld, perhaps you could inform me."

"Do you know where we are going?"

"Why yes, of course! We're going to Albion on a diplomatic assignment, I was told that much."

Louise mentally frowned. She didn't really consider this a "diplomatic assignment"; it was more of an espionage mission to facilitate other diplomatic possibilities, which was exactly why the captain of an elite front-line military force was the least suited person to send along. She didn't know who the captain of Tristain's espionage corps was, and it was probably a good thing she didn't because otherwise that organization wouldn't have been doing its job.

"Good. We plan to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Reconquista, to give us time to prepare our armies for when they inevitably attack us."

Wardes was caught off his footing slightly. Neither Henrietta nor the Queen would entrust such a delicate task to the volatile de Valliere daughter, and such an envoy would never be sent alone. She was either telling a falsification to test him, seeing if he would buy it, or was telling him her cover story. Either way, she was definitely planning to negotiate with the Royalists, possibly to extract Prince Wales.

He knew that Henrietta had at one time been infatuated with the Albionian prince, and was now planning to marry the emperor of Germania, which created another quandary. Extracting the prince would surely bring up their childhood affair and ensure diplomatic difficulties with Reconquista.

Maybe she was on an assassination mission, to kill either the leader of the Albionian rebel movement or the prince himself. One would effectively break the rebels' coordination, allowing the royalists to strike back; the other would open negotiation channels with Reconquista on favorable terms.

He decided to go along with her story, she might reveal more.

Louise picked up on her fiancé's sudden uncertainty. He was most definitely a spy from some other nation, possibly Reconquista. The real Wardes, in her mind, wouldn't betray his country for another, he must be a plant, a look-alike to deceive her.

"Where did you leave your Griffin? The ship is boarding soon; we'll need to collect it."

He whistled, and out of the dark clouds overhead dropped his steed.

"Right here. He can fly along behind us, though, so we don't need to bring him aboard."

So it definitely was the real Wardes, the difficulty in finding an exact lookalike complete with an identical familiar animal would have been exceeding difficult and impractically expensive. Louise was faced with the quandary: should she accept his aid, with the almost guaranteed betrayal coming and find out exactly what was happening, or did she have her familiar kill him now and justify her actions later?

She decided to wait and find out what he was up to, after all, there was still a miniscule chance he was telling the truth.

As the sun rose hidden behind overcast clouds, she marched up to the gangplank of the waiting airship.

"Papers please." a tired crewman asked her and Wardes.

Louise fished a few sheets of paper out of the bag she had been given by the musketeer and handed them to the crewman.

"For both of you? These are only for one Louise de Valliere."

"No, just for me," she turned to the captain of the Griffin Knights, "I presume you were given your own paperwork?"

If he didn't have the proper authorization, he was most definitely a spy and had betrayed his nation for some unknown reason.

He confirmed the falsification of his earlier story when he found himself without any boarding papers or customs documentation.

"Louise my dear, you see…" he started. He didn't realize she was leaving right away, he had figured that he could procure the documentation once she knew what ship she was boarding.

"Yes, I see," she interrupted Wardes, "That you are a traitor, a villain of the worst kind. Why would you betray your queen? You had prestige, fame, power, and were in line to marry into the most powerful family in Tristain! What did they offer you to turn? Kingship?"

"My Louise! You've got me all wrong! It's just…"

"Yes, I've had you all wrong, but now I know who you really are! It's just that you are nothing more than a filthy dog, nay, even they have loyalty! I am not yours, and never will be!"

She drew her wand and aimed it carefully at his head.

"Familiar! Strike him!"

Wardes immediately rolled to the side and whistled for his Griffon, narrowly avoiding a beam of magical energy that crackled through the air where he was standing.

"An interesting familiar you have summoned my dear, one that remains unseen. Unfortunately, it has exposed itself with that attack."

He drew his sword and swung it in a long arc in one motion, projecting a blade of electrical energy that arced outwards. Louise ducked beneath the arc of lightning and rolled on the ground. The electrical energy flashed towards her as it passed over, and would have fried her alive.

In her roll, her chain mail that she wore underneath her dress had come in contact with the ground, grounding her and turning the armor into a makeshift faraday cage and lightning rod. The arcs of electricity struck the metal dress and flowed straight into the ground.

She stood, up, smoking slightly, and pointed her wand where he stood.

"But my familiar is better," he declared.

His griffon swooped down from the skies, and moments before another laser from Rumia left him a smoking pile of ash, whisked him away.

"Familiar, fly up and bring him down! Then catch up to me with his body, or at least his head!"

She needed to have confirmation of the deed if she were to be sure that her familiar had done its job. After that, she figured the spirit could eat the corpse.

She turned and ran up the gangplank of the ship as it rose, leaping the final gap aboard the ship as it pulled away into the sky. She could see flashes of light in the clouds above as her familiar fought with the griffon-mounted traitor, and stood at the handrail of the ship, watching the display with little doubt as to the eventual victor. She just hoped Wardes wouldn't disengage and come to strike at her.

In the clouds and shrouded by darkness, Rumia blindly fired a salvo of magical bullets at her foe.

"What are you, familiar?" Wardes wondered aloud as he dodged the glowing points of light in the cloud bank. Nothing in Halkegenia ever used magic in this way, of the few familiars that actively used magic, they almost exclusively used mundane spells. Nothing, not even a human, ever put out so many magical projectiles that an army of battle mages would be put to shame.

He was surprised when the familiar answered, "I am Rumia, Youkai of Darkness!"

She fired another salvo of bullets out, bracketing the area she heard the voice coming from with a spread of magical balls of energy. Lasers swept between the projectiles further increasing the probability that something would be hit by the unaimed barrage.

The lasers always moved in long sweeps that converged to a point or were preceded by a visible but nonlethal line denoting their path. The bullets dramatically lost speed, slowing to a crawl, as they moved further away from their source. They formed almost beautiful expanding concentric rings around the Youkai, a feat of magic Wardes would have marveled at if he were not so busy trying to dodge them.

He fired back a blade of lightning at the spirit of darkness, easily identifiable as the origin point of all the magical bullets. He urged his griffon onwards, spurring it on to continue evading the storm of magic.

"Up! Up! Out of its plane of fire!"

The griffon shot up, breaking out of the cloudbank and into the dawning sun. Moments later and a far distance away, the youkai's bubble of darkness emerged as well.

"I see you now! You think you can escape!"

Pulses of magical projectiles, fired much faster and in straight lines at the griffon knight, shot from the youkai's outstretched hands. Suddenly confronted with aimed and fast moving rounds, Wardes was forced to turn so hard he almost fell off his griffon.

He swung his blade again, projecting another arc of electricity at Rumia. She easily, almost lazily, floated above the knife edged plane of charged particles, reflexes honed by a lifetime of facing more projectiles fired simultaneously than a battery of millatreuses and further enhanced by her combat centric runes.

He would never defeat this artillery battery of magical bullets and lasers at range, where it had the advantage. He charged.

His griffon shot forward towards the spirit of darkness, jinking around her shots. He swung his sword at his side, intending to slice the ball of night in half.

His blade was met with another. As he passed by, he could see the blood red eyes, the blood red runes on her blade of night, and the shining runes on her hand. The enchanted wand-blade encountered the blade formed of pure darkness with a loud crash.

Wardes arced away before Rumia could riposte and dove in for a second attack. Holding tight to his griffon, he spun a 360 degree corkscrew, dodging underneath Rumia's sword-strike and bringing his blade up beneath her to bisect her.

A lesser being would have been cut clean in half by Wardes's strike, but the youkai, with superhuman reflexes enhanced by arcane runes, shot upwards in the nick of time, causing the blade to embed itself in her leg.

The sudden movement wrenched the traitor's blade from his hand; it dangled from Rumia's leg.

"Damn!" Wardes cursed loudly at the loss of his focus, embedded somewhere within that ball of darkness. He spurred his griffon to dive back into the clouds for cover.

"Ouch! Come back, human! You forgot your sword!" Rumia giggled and dove into the cloud bank after him.

As she dove, she fired out a stream of bullets, hosing down the space Wardes had dove into with a hail of magical projectiles.

"Where did you go? Are you afraid of me?"

In the clouds, Wardes pulled a high-g force turn upwards, leveling out at the stream of bullets missed him by mere centimeters. He ignored his foe's taunts, as, without a casting implement, he couldn't strike back. He had a spare wand, be he couldn't retrieve it while riding his griffon and dodging bullets for his life. He nearly lost consciousness from the acceleration as he pulled out of the dive and shot off into the clouds to hide and recover.

Louise would surely sound the alarm as soon as she reached her destination, he must be sure to kill her and her familiar before she could. He dove beneath the clouds to search for the flying island he was heading to.

**Ship En-Route to Albion**

The ship sailed just beneath the cloud bank, heading towards the flying island of Albion. The wind was practically nonexistent; she drifted forward lazily making poor time. Louise stood at the handrail at the stern of the ship, watching the clouds for a sign of her familiar.

Speeding along just beneath the cloud bank came the familiar sphere of darkness that surrounded the spirit of the night, much to Louise's relief and the mild panic of the crew.

Rumia matched speed with the ship, hovering just in front of Louise, eyes glowing in the darkness.

A crewman readied his musket, Louise waved him down. He watched the sphere of darkness uneasily.

"Did you deal with him, familiar?"

"Sorry. He ran away and I couldn't find him. But he left his sword!"

The youkai pulled Wardes's sword out of her leg and dropped it at Louise's feet, before landing on the aft deck herself.

"Damn. Familiar, how long would it take you to fly back to La-Rochelle and find Agnes?"

"The nice lady with the gun who was afraid of me?"

"Yes, her. She'll be on the road home, I'm going to give you a message; I want you to deliver it to her."

"Okay!"

"Listen carefully and repeat exactly what I say to Agnes: Mission compromised, continuing anyway. Encountered Jean-Jaques de Wardes of the Griffon Knights, demonstrated knowledge of mission…"

"Can you write it down?"

Louise sighed. She reached into her bag and pulled out a scrap of parchment. She also produced a quill and inkpot; they had been packed along to record mission events; and began to write her message using the ship's handrail as a table.

She folded the sheet up neatly and handed it to her familiar.

"Tell Agnes to take this message to Henrietta, and that it is urgent. Just follow the road we came on, you should come across her eventually. Then fly back to me. Understand?"

"Yes!"

With that, Rumia floated into the air and shot off back in the direction she came from, heading back to La-Rochelle to find Agnes and deliver Louise's message.

* * *

Glad this received generally positive reviews. I think the millatreuse comparison may not be understood by most people. Oh well.

Pltrgst: This will continue. What website is that post from?

ArcherShirou: What were you expecting?


	5. Chapter 5: Storm the Castle

I own nothing, neither Touhou or Familiar of Zero. They are owned by ZUN and Noboru Yamaguchi, respectively. A break from Into the Woods references here.

* * *

**Londonium**

Over the wall walk of the city glided a mounted griffon. Reconquista soldiers pointed up and shouted. The figure signaled peaceful intent and was allowed to land.

"I must see Cromwell, this is urgent!"

"What is it? I'll take a message."

"Tell him there is an envoy from Tristain on her way to visit the Royalists, doing something to facilitate a Tristain-Germania alliance! You need to attack now!"

"Can you confirm this information?"

"I attempted to infiltrate her mission."

"Your identification?"

"Jean-Jacques de Wardes, Griffon Knight of Tristain."

The solider called to his comrade, who checked a logbook.

"You're clear," he turned to his companion, "Take this man to Cromwell, he had urgent information."

"Aye. Follow me sir."

They marched off towards Reconquista's headquarters to meet its leader.

**Road Back From La Rochelle **

Rumia flew along the road at breakneck speed, barely staying just above the tops of the trees. She had Louise's letter grabbed tightly in her hand as she whipped across the treetops. She was looking for the armed woman who had ridden Louise to La-Rochelle.

The traffic on the road increased as afternoon came about. Horses panicked and peasants pointed to the sky as she rocketed over their wagons, low enough that none could miss her.

It was late in the afternoon when she finally spotted the lone soldier riding her horse. The captain of the royal musketeers was riding like a madwoman, making all due haste back to her charge at the Academy.

"Musket lady! Wait! I have a message for you!"

She corkscrewed in the air and dove into the gap between the trees where the road cut, matching speeds with and flying beside the musketeer.

Her horse spooked from the sudden appearance of the night spirit, but she held it in line and brought it to a stop. It stamped the ground nervously.

"Yes, 'youkai'?"

"I brought you a message from Louise! It's important!"

She held out the folded piece of parchment for the musketeer. Her hand was still within her sphere of darkness.

"Where? Can you give it to me?"

"Here! Take it!"

"I can't see it."

"Oh. Sorry."

She retracted her bubble of shadow so her hand protruded. Anges stared at it, she knew that Henrietta's friend's familiar had daemonic glowing eyes, but didn't know exactly what it was. She had just figured it was a ball of darkness with eyes. Most daemons didn't resemble humans at all; those that did usually had claws or horrible deformities of the flesh. It didn't make the musketeer feel any more comfortable around the youkai, but at least it probably wasn't a daemon.

She took the message from Rumia, who immediately re-shrouded her hand and rocketed back into the sky to return to Louise. The familiar runes gave her an instinctive sense of where her master was and called her to defend her master.

Agnes spurred her horse onwards and inspected the message. It wasn't sealed, so she unfolded it and read it as she rode. She was confused and horrified by the message, and drove her horse harder to reach the princess.

**Newcastle, Albion**

The tattered remnants of the Royalist army were filtering in from the disastrous battles with the Reconquista. Here the sole surviving members of the royal family, King James Tudor and Prince Wales Tudor, planned to make their final stand. Hoardings were being installed atop the walls of the aging fortress and city walls, storerooms were stocked for siege, and soldiers burned the surrounding countryside to deny Reconquista the vital supplies to maintain their attack.

The remnants of the divisions of soldiers that once marched under the banner of the king until tactical incompetence and popular opposition brought them low were re-equipped and rested at this mighty fortress. Springalds were mounted atop the castle's towers to fire their heavy spears down upon an attacking army and magonels were assembled within the walls to hurl rocks and flaming bundles of straw and cloth out upon an enemy. Arrows and spears were stacked up in bins within the hoardings, as were stones to drop through the murder holes. Wet animal skins were laid out over the wooden roofs of the town, castle, and hoardings to diminish the chance of the enemy setting fire to the defenses. Rested soldiers patrolled the walls, searching for any sign of the enemy.

Raindrops began to pelt the animal skins that covered the roof of the castle as a storm broke. Soon, rivers flowed in the dirt streets as driving rain pelted the window panes.

The ship slipped into the city in the night. Magelights and torches burned brightly in the fog that shrouded the flying island from the companies of soldiers that organized in the streets. Every peasant in the city had been conscripted to fill the ranks of the broken army.

Dockmen jumped up and secured the ship as she slipped up to the hidden pier next to a raiding frigate, the last warship of the once proud Royal Albionian Navy.

"Cargo manifest?"

One of the ship's crewmen handed over a list of the ship's contents and dock hands jumped up to begin unloading her. Louise was the only passenger; she walked down onto the pier amidst the unloading of crates of food, guns, ammunition, and other weapons. She wondered where her familiar was.

"I must see the prince; this is of important diplomatic matters!"

"And you are?"

"Louise Francois de Valliere of Tristain, on an errand from her majesty Princess Henrietta!"

A man, captain of the frigate, stepped up to her.

"Do you have identification?"

"Yes."

Louise fished around in her bag and produced identification paperwork and the ring she had been given by Henrietta. The man momentarily reviewed her papers and returned them to her, but held onto the ring.

"That's property of the crown of Tristain," she warned him, "Take me to the prince."

The captain slipped off his armored glove, revealing a ring of his own. He held the ring up to his own, but shielded it from Louise's eyes with his glove.

"You're talking to him now."

He returned the ring and put his glove back on.

She handed him the sealed letter from Henrietta.

"I need a letter sent to you by my princess, a love letter of sort."

"Yes, follow me somewhere private."

The prince led Louise through the streets of the city and into the castle while he opened and read Henrietta's letter.

"Tell her that I will stay to lead my men, here, in Albion."

"What?"

He held the letter out for Louise to see.

"She's offering amnesty and protection if I sneak out and escape aboard your ship home. I plan to fight here with my men."

Louise read through the letter.

"Why? Dying here does you or your men no good! She loves you; we can provide you with the men and equipment to retake your kingdom if you live! If you stay here, it will just be the end of one of the royal family lines!"

They reached his room in the castle. He rummaged around in a desk drawer and produced a well-worn scrap of parchment. He looked at its contents one more time, sadly, and folded it up and gave it to Louise.

"Here you go. I will make my stand here. If I am to die, tell her to find someone else to be happy with."

Louise took the love note and tossed it into the fireplace. The flames licked at the dried animal skin until it caught, they both watched silently as the message burned away into ashes. Wales tossed in the message Louise had brought as well.

A clamor in the halls caught their attention.

"Reconquista's attacking! To your battle stations!"

Soldiers rushed about in the halls and in the streets below. In the town square, a magonel kicked and flung the head of the messenger who had brought Reconquista's surrender ultimatum over the walls, back to their army with King James's response.

Louise was suddenly very frightened. She had never been at war before, and was supposed to get out before battle started. She knew she was probably disposable if the mission failed.

She wished she hadn't sent her familiar away. Where was the youkai anyway? Reconquista wouldn't attack in the night, but come daybreak, there would most certainly be an all-out offensive. She wanted her familiar to be here to defend her when that happened.

Through the night drenched soldiers rushed around preparing their weapons and stations for war. Men took up their posts along the hoardings, preparing to repel the escalade that would surely occur at daybreak. Torches and magelights burned in the driving rain, casting their flickering shadows upon the flooded nighttime streets.

Louise watched from window in the town's castle. Inside, it may have been as warm as a stone castle could be, but she involuntarily shivered. Wales stood behind her, watching the preparations.

Beyond the walls they could see the countless fires of the Reconquista army, dotting the scorched, flooded landscape with huddled squads trying to stay dry and warm. The firelight in the rain barely illuminated the tiny forms of soldiers scurrying about preparing ladders for the escalade.

"Don't throw your life away here. We still have time to escape aboard the ships."

"Do you have such little faith in all your endeavors? We will not fall here; this is where we turn the tide!"

"They must outnumber you 5 to 1 at least! How will you ever hold them back?"

"Never doubt our will to succeed. They have marched through all yesterday to get here and are spending the night preparing. They will be weary and poorly prepared during their morning attack, and the weather is poor for an attack. We will have no problem driving them back."

"What about their ships? What about their siege weapons and mages? Why don't you attack now if they are so unprepared?"

"We can intercept their warships with the cannons your ship brought in, and their siege artillery will take days to assemble. We also have better mages than they do. I have already petitioned my father to allow me to lead a counterattack, but he refuses to spare the men for such an action; we need every man to repel their initial assault."

Louise didn't know anything about military strategy, and didn't pretend to. She just continued to watch out the window as the rain pounded against the windowpane. She wondered if her familiar had successfully delivered her message to Agnes, or if the childish night spirit had become lost. She shouldn't have entrusted such an important warning to the little girl.

"We can find you a place to sleep. The ship won't be sailing in this weather."

"No thank you."

Wales stood and left the office, leaving Louise alone. She couldn't sleep that night, and didn't want to. She was afraid, afraid for her life. Her primary mission was accomplished, and there was nothing she could do to sway Wales's opinion. She stood the entire night looking out the blurry window at the rain-soaked town and the fires of the enemy.

She almost missed morning time; the heavy clouds obscured the rising sun. Lightning flashed against the sky, illuminating the assembled soldiers.

Looking out the window, she could see the ranks of Reconquista's army, lined up by platoon and company is perfect blocks of men. Teams held the siege ladders at ready, waiting for the signal to begin. The command squad stood out ahead of the army before the main gates of the city, their flag bearer held aloft a pole flying a large solid red flag. The general drew his wand and pointed it at the barred and reinforced gate.

A bolt of flame shot out towards the wood, steel, and stone structure and burst against it. Wet skins and the rain smothered the flames, but the attack's symbolic intent was achieved. As one, the army of the Reconquista surged forwards.

Archers in the hoardings volleyed arrows as one. Longbow arrows easily tore through the makeshift leather armor most of the peasant infantry wore and splintered their thin wooden shields. It seemed to Louise that the first rank of the army had suddenly collapsed on the ground.

The soldiers stepped over their fallen comrades and continued their charge for the walls. Magonels within the fortress fired, hurling their stone projectiles over the walls into the midst of the attacking army. The rocks crashed into the ranks of the peasants, crushing those unlucky enough to be hit and bounced, smashing heads and bodies, killing more.

Springalds, mounted on swiveling turntables, fired their spears into the formation. Each spear was fired with the force to penetrate the hull of a warship, and easily ripped through the peasants they hit, impaling them into the ground.

Reconquista's archers returned fire. Crossbow bolts clattered off the hide-covered hoardings and longbow arrows sailed over the wall and fell in the streets. Everybody had sought shelter within the defenses, and the arrow barrage was largely ineffective.

The roar of cannon fire startled Louise. Reconquista had managed to deploy their lighter artillery during the night. The 8-pounder guns fired over their army. The solid shot hit the base of the town walls, where the stonework was sloped to deflect incoming projectiles.

Lightning flashed, and Louise could see the larger pieces being dragged around be teams of horses to their firing positions. Limbers and caissons were bogged down in the mud, even the comparatively tiny 1000-kilogram 8-pounder guns were proving difficult to move.

The guns of the royalists returned fire. The ship Louise came on had brought a battery of 12 10-pounder half-kartouwen guns to supplement the Royalists' defenses.

The medium artillery roared, shaking the foundations of the castle with their muzzle shockwave. From their deployment atop the walls near the gate, they fired their heavy shot at the enemy artillery. Cannonballs splintered gun carriages and splattered the horses that pulled the caissons. Chainshot, usually fired from naval guns, ripped through gun crews with ease.

The Royalist gunners, untrained on Tristanian artillery pieces, rushed to reload their weapons as the archers fired again.

The scaling ladders hit the walls, hooks at the end sought purchase on the wooden hoardings and stone fortification. Royalists soldiers tried to push the ladders away from the walls before the infantry could climb them. One ladder fell backwards, crushing peasants it landed on. All the others found purchase with their hooks and axe-wielding soldiers raced up to try to had their way into the hoardings.

Archers fired down on those scaling the ladders, shooting them off to fall into the swarm below, while others dropped spears through the murder holes in the hoardings. Reconquista soldiers were skewered by falling projectiles as they pushed ahead, storming up the ladders.

Where the axe-men reached the top, they were met with spears stuck out through slits in the wooden structure to keep them away. Still, some managed to chop through the hoardings, clearing a path for soldiers behind them to climb up onto the walls.

Where they did so, the fighting dissolved into a swirling melee, as swordsmen and spearmen desperately battled to either gain a foothold atop the defenses of force their opponent off the wall into the swirling mass below.

With Reconquista tired by the march and the night's preparations, the Royalists managed, for the most part, to keep the battle contained where the ladders landed.

Surviving artillery pieces from the Reconquista fired again, aiming higher, at the hoardings, intending the breach the fortifications. Louise watched from her window as 8 pound cannonballs shattered the wooden structures that protected the Royalist soldiers and plowed into the houses of the town.

The driving rain and mud made it difficult for Reconquista to move their equipment and the storm prevented their airships from reinforcing their men.

The Royalists' artillery, cannons, magonels, and springalds alike, had a field day on the massed soldiers of Reconquista. By late morning, Reconquista's men withdrew, leaving a field of mutilated corpses behind. Louise could see the carnage from the castle; it revolted her.

Down in the town square, she could see Wales, mounted on his horse despite the lightning, waving his sword-wand in the air, rallying his men to strike back.

Suddenly, the window shattered and Louise was shrouded in blackness.

"I'm back!"

"Familiar? Did you give Agnes the letter?"

Only one thing could make such a field of darkness; Louise was immensely relieved to have her familiar back, it meant that Agnes had probably received the message and that she had a ticket out of Albion before the ship sailed.

"Yes. I'm tired."

Louise realized how tired she was. She hadn't slept since yesterday, and even then she had awakened long before daylight. Now she was under siege in this founder-forsaken fortified town in Albion, and her familiar was probably too tired to fly her out. She might as well try to get some rest now that the initial escalade had been beaten off.

Reconquista would resort to shelling the city and castle with catapults and cannons while they assembled their larger siege engines. Hopefully, they'd run out of supplies on the burned out countryside around the city before the city's defenders did, but Louise hoped to be long gone by then.

Nonetheless, with the driving rain and lightning storm grounding all ships and her familiar probably exhausted, Louise was not going to be leaving immediately. She sat down in the chair at Wales's desk and collapsed. The rain whipped into the room through the window Rumia had broken; the shrieking of the wind almost drowned out the pounding of the cannons as they exchanged fire.

Rumia noticed her master was asleep and sat down and curled up on Louise's lap. Youkai do not, under normal circumstance, require sleep at all. Rumia was no exception. However, the emotional bond the familiar runes created shared Louise's emotions with the youkai, causing Rumia to feel tired when Louise was, despite the fact she needed no sleep.

They were designed to keep the familiar in the optimal state to serve the master, awake, but were also designed to be inscribed upon humans, who needed sleep and deteriorated without it. Thus, the familiar would sleep when the master slept, but remain in a state in which it would awake instantly if the master was in peril.

However, the Youkai of the Shadows was nocturnal; most active at night, her realm of power. When darkness fell, she would be instantly awakened and remain awake.

During the day, the air near the ground turned cold, dropping well below zero centigrade. The air up in the thunderheads remained warm as two cold air pockets occluded a warmer one, keeping the rain that fell liquid. The sheets of water falling from the sky froze as it contacted the ground and the structures of the city.

Gun barrels and torsion coils for catapults were frozen over with a glaze of crystal ice, rendering them useless. Swords froze into their scabbards and the leather joints in the plate armor of knights became brittle. The soaked skins that covered the damaged hoardings became hardened plates of armor, encased within a solid covering of ice. Soldiers under the hoardings sheltered within the turrets that dotted the perimeter wall. Others sought shelter within the houses of the city.

Outside the protective walls, the muddy ground froze solid, entrapping gun carriages in the frozen earth and sticking discarded weaponry to the ground. Soldiers desperately tried to keep their dying campfires burning as frostbite set in on skin exposed to the wind and freezing rain.

The royalist counterattack had been cancelled when the gates became frozen shut with ice, the iron portcullis frozen in the down position. Ice glazed over the murder holes in the hoardings and the gatehouse.

Within the room Louise sat in a layer of grey ice coated over the floors and walls near the broken window. The noble girl was kept warm by the fire burning in the fireplace and the warm body sleeping on top of her, and didn't feel the cold that permeated the room. The shattered windowpane became spiked with sharp points of icicles and warmth from the fireplace melted the ice that froze within the room slightly and it dripped down like stalactites and stalagmites.

Despite the cold and ice, for the first time in a week, Louise slept well.

* * *

If it helps, magonels are medium catapults, similar to onagers, half-kartouwen are dutch medium siege guns, and springalds are like ballistae (sort of, not really i guess, but they do the same thing. I could tell you how to build one, but there isn't much point). Trebuchets are the big catapults that throw really big rocks and have a counterweight, battering rams, siege towers, and siege ladders are self explanatory. Sappers are guys who dig under the walls and set their tunnel on fire to bring the wall down. Hoardings are wooden shelters build over the tops of castle walls to shelter soldiers. A milleatreuse is a french prototype machinegun-thing. An escalade is the initial ladder assault that sieges usually open with. Artillery are the big guns and catapults, but I'll probably use it in reference to cannons. I'm not sure if half-kartouwen could fire chainshot at all, but oh well. Siege engineering is actually really interesting (but sieges themselves are pretty boring after the initial escalade, as they mostly consist of people sitting around waiting for the other to starve. Eventually the attacker gets bored and breaks out sappers and siege towers and battering rams to try to finish the fight, if they loose that final push, they pretty much lost).

re7utf: Never read that one, but given it seems to be about Rumia, it is probably similar. It isn't here on .

BulletSpam: Thank you. Error fixed. Any here?

Mizuki00: Thank you. I am not offended in any way by your reviews. This chapter is longer than the others so far. Like my other fanfiction, the chapters start off shorter and less detailed (and generally worse, probably) but get better as I get more comfortable. I do play WoT, I'm a tank/tactics/military history buff, to say the least, and my friend recommended it to me (along with a funny anime about schoolgirls driving WWII tanks) because it was free. I mostly play tabletop wargames, specifically Warhammer 40k (as Imperial Guard) and Panzer Leader (this is an old Avalon Hill WWII tactical game, with hex-mapboards and little counters with lots of numbers). There are a lot of specific military descriptions in this chapter, if they confuse you, sorry. I did separate Louise and Rumia, temporarily, and the danger is still very real (not to mention Wardes will have to come back eventually, plots demand the "bad guys" lose eventually). There will be more gruesome actions; I deleted a portion about what chainshot does to people it hits, (it was too much space devoted to something irrelevant). I don't want this to be a tribute to the Chaos God of blood and skulls, so not every chapter will be gory like the second and third. Still, sorry if the military stuff gets in your way of reading or confuses you. It probably won't get much more than this, Louise and Rumia are far from being generals.

Tama Saga: This chapter had more tactics, I think. I don't really try to balance descriptions of battle tactics and description of people dying or being wounded horribly, they just happen when it take up space and seems to be a good opportunity to either demonstrate my knowledge of military history or lack of knowledge about human insides.

Dark0w1: That's funny.


	6. Chapter 6: Reconquista's Charge

Hello. more war. And some bizzare meterology.

I own nothing, neither Touhou or Familiar of Zero. They are owned by ZUN and Noboru Yamaguchi, respectively.

* * *

**Newcastle, Albion**

At nightfall, Rumia awoke promptly. The freezing rain pounded down in sheets outside and lightning flashed in the thunderstorm overhead. She stretched, waking up Louise. The noble girl shivered as the cold wind blew through the room; she noticed the shattered window spiked with spears of ice.

"Familiar, can we leave this Brimir-forsaken place?"

"Sure! I'm hungry first."

Louise sighed. It made sense; her familiar hadn't eaten since they fled the academy.

"Fine. But don't eat the people in the city. They're our friends. You can eat the people outside."

"Okay!"

Rumia launched herself out the window, knocking off the sharp icicles as she passed through the holes and flew out over the town wall.

Louise grabbed a coat from the wall to keep herself warm. She opened the door and stepped out into the castle hallway. At the end of the hall was the staircase leading to the wall walk and down to the ground floor.

Louise headed up to the wall walk to wait for her familiar, sheltered by the castle hoardings. The walls themselves were deserted, all the soldiers were sheltering within the fortress itself, only the tower sentries kept watch.

As a floating island, Albion is susceptible to strange weather patterns. It almost floats within the cloud banks, shrouding its higher parts in fog year round. Updrafts of warm, moist air from the ocean are brought high into the atmosphere around and over it, where they cool.

It blocks the updrafts of warm air rising from the ocean beneath it, forcing them around the edge, causing the atmospheric convection to bring down a column of cold, wet air directly over the floating island. The columns of hot, rising air from the sea that surround it meet the cold column of falling air that eternally rests over it, creating dangerous storm fronts around its edges.

As moving clouds, heavy with water evaporated from the surrounding ocean, are forced upwards around the island and into the swirling air currents where they release their payload of water in sudden and seemingly unending downpours. The turbulent meeting of the two bodies of air, mixed by the fast moving prevailing high atmosphere winds, causes the formation of horizontal vortices of air, similar to tornadoes on normal land, that parallel the edge of the island during the summer and autumn and long, violent squalls of freezing rain that whips in all directions during the winter and spring.

The island wouldn't have been worth colonizing in the first place if it weren't for the massive deposits of windstones that made it fly in the first place. The cold temperatures, high winds, and driving rain killed all but the hardiest of plants; the only trees that could be seen in most places were gnarled clusters of white bark pines.

Deep within the windstone mines, peasant laborers worked around the clock to dredge out these minerals in conditions so hazardous that there was rarely a day that a worked didn't die in a mine. The winds wipped around the ropes that supported mining elevators that dropped deep into the earth, wooden scaffolds that supported winches creaked in the wind, and the bore holes rang with harmonic vibrations from the overblowing air that frequently caused tunnels to collapse.

The windstones were Albion's most valuable resource, and its greatest disadvantage. Created as magical energies coalesced within the planet, these crystals were volatiles masses of magical energies. As they decayed, they released their pent up wind magic to lift objects high into the air, as they did ships and Albion itself. An uncontrolled detonation of a critical mass of windstones could catapult mountainsides into the air and devastate the surrounding area. A detonation on a massive scale is believed to have torn Albion away from the continent in the first place.

The weather would spell to doom of the Reconquista army if they didn't achieve victory soon. A siege would rapidly become untenable as supplies were exhausted and soldiers froze to death while the enemy hid within their relatively warm city. With their artillery out of service or incomplete and army suffering horrible casualties on the field, the generals settled on a final plan. The white bark pines that formed up the majority of the trees in Ablion were wholly unsuitable for siege engineering. Neither long nor straight, the stunted, gnarled trees couldn't be used for catapult arms, siege tower parts, or battering rams.

However, Reconquista had captured the massive windstone stockpiles when they had taken the Albionian naval yards. To breach the wall, sappers would dig long tunnels beneath the walls of the fortress, where stacks and stacks of windstones would be placed. When these were detonated, they would blast the curtain walls of the city apart and leave it bare for the infantry to move in. This process would take weeks to months to complete, prolonged by the storms that wracked the area and the determined Royalist defenders.

As Rumia glided over the curtain walls, she spotted a team of men crawling about in the darkness at the base of the wall, moving up a small, mobile shelter. They carried swords and shovels. She dropped down behind them, shrouded in darkness.

"Hello! Why are you here?"

The surprised soldiers spun around, drawing their swords. They saw the glowing, blood-red eyes in the darkness and panicked. One ran, fleeing back for the Reconquista lines. The childish youkai, like human children, cats, and dogs, is most entertained by things that move. The running soldier immediately drew her attention.

"You can't get away from me!"

A beam of concentrated magical energy sliced through the fleeing soldier's torso, vaporizing his vital organ block in a clean hole. He hit the frozen ground, dead, and was nearly instantly frozen over with ice.

The other two soldiers attacked while Rumia was momentarily distracted. One lunged with his sword, aiming for the eyes, trying to run the blob of blackness through. The blade connected with the youkai's cheekbone and left a deep gash on the side of her face.

"Ouch!" she declared as it healed quickly and became unrecognizable in an instant.

The second soldier was already swinging his blade. The runes on her hand glowed brightly, granting her increased situational awareness, and she spun instantly to dodge the incoming attack. Her blade of darkness was already forming in her hand to block a remise from the first soldier.

The steel blade connected with the shadow blade in the darkness with a resonating clang. Ducking to the side, Rumia brought her bastard sword down from her parry-five and swung it laterally to cut the man in half. The magical blade cut through his stomach and spilled his steaming innards out upon the glaze of ice that covered the ground, staining the crystallized water red with blood.

The surviving soldier stabbed blindly into the darkness, since he couldn't see what he was facing. The blade connected with Rumia's outstretched wrist, slicing a deep gash up her arm as she turned.

He watched the glowing runes in the darkness to identify Rumia's blade, and jumped aside as he saw it swing for him. He immediately lunged out, stabbing into the spirit's chest before recovering to parry her riposte.

As he blocked her blade, the Youkai of Darkness shot out a low spread of magical bullets. They formed a perfect expanding circle around her, slightly above knee height. The magical projectiles cut into the soldier's legs, leaving a cauterized mess of blood vessel and stringy bits of muscle where his legs used to be.

He screamed as he hit the ground and Rumia leaped on top of him. Atop the wall, soldiers leaped to the battlements, alerted by the Reconquista soldier's scream. Scanning the darkness, the Royalists could hear the soft creaking of the wheels of the sappers' tents and see the work crews moving up behind them.

Longbow arrows whistled overhead as Rumia sat down on top of her prey and ripped open his chest cavity. Her back was to the curtain wall, she was invisible to the Royalist archers, but the peasant sappers of the Reconquista could clearly see her blood red eyes as two points in the dark.

Longbow arrows peppered their positions, bouncing off the ice-glazed roofs of the sappers' tents and filling peasant miners with arrows like porcupines. Broken, the survivors fled, leaving the wounded and the sapping tools on the battlefield to be frozen beneath a layer of ice.

The dying man's blood ran out and froze on the ice around Rumia as she munched on his ribs, oblivious to the rout of the peasant sappers. She broke his neck to stifle his frantic screams.

A crossbow bolt from the Reconquista's soldiers embedded itself between her eyes and a cheer went up from an enemy crossbow post. She paused for a moment, then ripped out the bolt and let her regeneration repair the damage. She stared off in the direction the attack came from, and then launched herself into the air, prey temporarily forgotten.

She rocketed over the ground, firing volleys of magical bullets ahead of her in the general direction of her unseen assailant. Reconquista crossbowmen frantically began to fire off shot after shot as they realized that she hadn't been put down by their initial, excellent shot. A laser beam flashed in the night, splintering the wooden shield they had been using for cover and mowing down a fleeing peasant sapper.

In an instant, they had scattered. Other formations that had been prepared to support the sappers began to break and flee as bullets began to spread in all directions. One of Rumia's lasers cooked off a caisson from a nearby artillery piece; the gunpowder exploded in a bright flash that temporarily illuminated the fleeing peasantry of Reconquista's army for the Royalist archers.

Scores were felled, perforated by longbow arrows. The wounded were left to die in the ice that coated the ground as the tattered remnants of the sapping force fell back to their siege encampments. Rumia returned to the men she had killed earlier to finish her meal.

Atop the battlements of the wall walk, Rumia's discharges could be easily seen in the night. To the wall defenders, it seemed that there had been a divine intervention in their favor, despite the fact that they had killed far more people than the youkai's magical salvoes had. However, the impressive light show the magical bullets made, radiating out in perfect rings and arcs punctuated by shining lasers inspired the archers.

At the Reconquista camp, whispers ran along the line and through the troops about a daemon that had taken to the field and singlehandedly slaughtered their soldiers. Peasants are bound to exaggerate claims, and the supernatural catches their attention far better than mundane barrages of arrows. The generals quickly came to the conclusion that a mage would have to be sent out to find and dispel this daemon, which was no doubt just a Royalist mage, to calm the peasantry, but who would?

Heads turned to the newcomer, Jean-Jacques de Wardes, a Griffon Knight of Tristain and their secret supporter, to reconnoiter and infiltrate the fort. With the failure to bring forward the sapping tents, he was also to open the gates from the inside to allow Reconquista soldiers to enter the fort.

"Infiltrate and search the fortress to dispel the rumor of this daemon that is scaring the peasantry. Then open the gates for our men. That will be the signal for our men to attack," a black robed woman, Reconquista's liaison with Gallia, ordered.

He mounted his griffon and launched into the stormy night.

In the darkness, Rumia was practically invisible as she devoured her prey. Wardes overflew her without notice as he made his way to the castle.

The soldiers on the wall had already returned to the shelter offered by the towers and houses within the city and castle, nobody saw the traitorous Griffin Knight as he glided over the walls. He brought his griffon to a halt above the walls of the castle and leaped off. A mage would not settle for staying with the peasantry in the city.

His boots clattered and slipped on the glaze of ice that covered the skins on the top of the hoarding. He gripped the harness of his griffon to keep from sliding off to fall down off the sloped roof of the hoardings. He dragged himself over the back edge, wand drawn, and swung through the open back of the hoardings onto the wall walk.

He hit the stone battlements with a clang and almost slipped back on the ice that coated the edge of the walkway. Grabbing a wooden support to ensure his footing, he carefully stood up and stepped onto the mostly dry wall-walk, and nearly stumbled into a very surprised young noble girl.

Louise recovered quickly, her mother had taught her not to be surprised by anything, and sounded the alarm.

"Spies! Infiltrators! The Traitor is up on the wall! Guards!"

Wardes shot out an arc of lightning to silence her. She leaped over the stone parapet into the front of the hoarding as the blade of electricity passed her by.

He suddenly realized what the "daemon" that the peasants had thought they had seen was. It was Louise's familiar, the black ball of darkness with glowing red eyes that she had sent to attack him when she found him out. The traitor whistled for his griffon to pick him up at the back edge of the wall walk while Louise carefully trained her wand on him.

As the griffon dropped over the roof of the hoarding to allow him to leap on, Louise cast the only thing she could to stop him.

"Explosion!"

A bolt of magic shot from her wand and detonated in a bright flash of energy. The griffon exploded in a shower of gory chunks, Wardes was blasted back against the parapet of the castle, and splinters of wood and stone were thrown out from the wall.

Instantly, every guard was awake and running to his station.

Wardes dragged himself up. He was bruised and probably bleeding internally from the shock, his armor was dented and torn, and his wand had been thrown from him in the blast. He had to get back to the army and warn them, but Louise had just blown up his familiar. Inside, he felt an acute sense of loss as the mental link he shared with the familiar was severed.

"Familiar! Where are you?" Louise cried out, worried and far from confident in her abilities.

Wardes looked around. He could see where his wand had landed, it had flown over the parapet and landed in the front of the haording. He almost collapsed as his legs nearly gave out from beneath him. He heard the clatter of the tower door opening and guards rushing out onto the walkway behind him.

He leaped over the parapet into the front of the hoardings where Louise had sought shelter. She turned to target him; he smashed the wooden front of the shelter and leaped off the high wall. He quickly cast a levitation spell to spare himself the fall from the wall walk and hit the ground running. Driven on by fear of death and urgency, he ran through the streets straight for the main gate.

A magical explosion detonated behind him, making him stumble, but he kept running. Archers began to fire arrows from the battlements of the castle at him; they clattered off the stone pavers of the street around him.

The street ran straight from the castle gate to the town gate, he fired off spell after spell as he ran, trying futilely to break the fortified entrance. Lightning bolts seared the heavy wooden doors. He reached the gatehouse, his speed enhanced by a wind spell, and rushed up the stairs to where guards were taking up defensive positions.

Up on the wall of the castle, Rumia alighted next to Louise, having finished her meal.

"What is it?"

"Wardes! The traitor, he tried to sneak into the castle but I spotted him! He's trying to escape, running for the gatehouse! Stop him!"

Louise grabbed onto the youkai as she launched off the wall walk and rocketed towards the ground. Louise felt the G-forces as her familiar pulled out of her dive and rocketed up the street towards the gatehouse, where Wardes was fighting with the archers.

He had no weapon except for his wand. He electrocuted the first soldier he encountered atop the wall and ducked beneath the sword of another. As he dodged, he searched for anything that could be used to open the gate. His eyes spotted the munitions chest for one of the half-kartouwen placed atop the wall.

He turned to cast at the case of gunpowder, evading the spear-strike from a Royalist soldier. Just as he was about to case, a dark form slammed into him like a cannonball. Louise rolled on the deck and stood up as her familiar plowed into Wardes and dropped her. Within an instant, she had her wand drawn and aimed at the traitor.

"I'm taking you with me, familiar!" he shouted as he cast at the munitions crate.

The high voltage bolt of electricity set off the gunpowder in the crate, which then set off more crates that had been stockpile for the two guns that defended the gate. The gatehouse erupted into a massive fireball; guards, stone, steel, and wood were thrown from the exploding battlements. The wooden doors were shattered and the steel portcullis blown from its guides.

Louise was thrown from the wall and landed in the street behind it in a shower of debris. Rumia was nearly shredded by fragments of stone and wood. The runes on her hand shined brightly as they augmented her youkai regeneration, she drifted down to stand guard over her unconscious master's body.

The army of Reconquista saw the explosion, and, as the overhead stormclouds lightened ever so slightly as the sun rose, marched forth to attack the gate. They poured everything into this final assault, peasant infantrymen, spurred on by nobles at their backs, charged forward across the field for the hole breached in the wall. Everything was poured into this final assault.

The wall archers opened fire, volleying longbow arrows out into the army. Their comrades fell around them, but fear of the mages at the back drove the soldiers of Reconquista on. Rumia watched as the army charge across the frozen ground towards her and her master.

In an instant, she shot out a salvo of bullets. A stream of fasting moving magical projectiles shot from each of her outstretched hands and wove around. The two streams of glowing bullets formed a beautiful double-helix that she swept back and forth across the line. She projected arcs of ripples from her, forming shining wave fronts of bullets that ripped into the mob of soldiers.

Those that were hit by the bullets were vaporized, they left clean holes cut straight through the unfortunate peasants. The bullets tore through the mass of soldiers like a machinegun, scything them down without mercy.

A platoon seemed to break up, preparing to flee.

"No retreat!" a mage shouted and cast a wall of flame amongst the fleeing peasants, burning them alive.

Moments after he marked himself by casting magic, he was spitted through by a hail of arrows.

Bodies began to pile up in the field, riddled with arrows and missing arms and legs, but the wave of peasantry came on. They scrambled over the corpses of their brethren as comrades were felled about them.

Riding out from the shattered gate thundered a company of noble cavalrymen, Prince Wales at their head. They rode out between the storm of bullets Rumia laid down in a spearhead, dodging between the glowing balls of energy as they rode down on the peasantry of Reconquista.

The prince swung his saber in one hand, firing out an arcing blade of air that tore into the peasantry. Spears of water, blades of wind, spikes of rocks, and streams of flame lashed out from the mounted nobles as they cast their spells into the flood of peasants.

The thunder of hooves shook the ground and cracked the ice as the riders bore down on the peasants. The freezing rain whipped at the faces of the cavalrymen, their breath steamed in the cold, dark air.

Directed by their mage-commanders, the remnants of each platoon formed up into phalanxes, locking their lightweight shields and pointing their spears between them to hopefully spit the cavalry.

The formation of horsemen split, half breaking off to the left, the other half breaking right, to clear Rumia's fire lane and strike the phalanxes from their unprotected sides. Magical bullets ripped through wooden shields and scythed down the first ranks of the army while nobles' spells ripped apart the edges of the formations.

The horsemen turned about once along the edges of the formation and charged straight into its side. Peasants hastily turned to face the oncoming horsemen, who collided with their ranks with the crackle of magic and the clang of metal.

Blades were swung to the side of the horses, decapitating peasants left and right as the riders rode through the formations.

The formations disintegrated, peasant discipline and fear of their commanders was replaced with fear of the cavalry and the streams of glowing projectiles that shot from the ruined gateway. Soldiers dropped their weapons and fled, spreading out and they rushed back in a mad stampede.

Reconquista officers tried desperately to rally their men, in minutes they had been spitted by longbowmen on the walls.

Rumia launched herself into the air and abandoned the unconscious form of her master to finish of the fleeing army. Arms outstretched, she whistled just over their heads firing streams of bullets ahead of her, periodically blasting spheres of bullets outward from her.

She strafed their retreating army, vaporizing soldiers and cratering the ground with her glowing projectiles of magical energy. She spun a barrel roll over their heads and rocketed up into the stormy sky, firing salvoes behind her as she flipped over like a fighter plane and dove upon them again.

The cavalry rode amongst the rout, weaving around peasants and corpses and casting their spells. Chunks of soldier littered the scarred, ice covered ground.

Rumia pulled out of her dive centimeters above the heads of the peasants and shot back towards the gate, scything down more fleeing peasants as she fired expanding spheres of bullets out behind her.

She dove down into their rout and raked the peasants with lasers. The beams of energy began at her sides, perpendicular to her direction of flight, and swept forward until they met, cutting down the fleeing soldiers like a scythe in the grass.

Behind her she continued to fire out arcs of glowing bullets that left vaporized messes of their victims.

She rocketed back through the gateway and swept up her master's unconscious body in her arms. She pulled up away from the ground, carrying Louise, and leveled out flying upside down.

She rolled over and, carrying Louise, returned to the castle. Most of the peasants had dispersed, having fled in every which way, making Rumia's salvoes largely ineffective. The cavalry continued to hunt down stragglers in the freezing rain.

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Dark0w1: Consuming the entire army is a bit excessive. I'm pretty sure, even with a quick metabolism, she couldn't eat that much, and her "predator of humans" nature loses some shock value, because having her eat the entire army renders the point that she ate people moot compared to "she killed thousands". That doesn't mean she won't kill thousands, or eat people, it just means the two events will be mostly separate. Admittedly, I like your funny comments, though.

Tama Saga: Not neccessarily. A position floating above the clouds in a static position would create updrafts and force the clouds over it, where they are almost guaranteed to rain. Albion isn't in the stratosphere, people can live there, so the clouds have plenty of room to go up over it. I think that it would have weather patterns like those I described in the chapter (which is why I included that section). Magic could mitigate the cold, but why would the nobles spare the expense on the thousands of peasants?

Mizuki00: I'm like Yukari. I love tanks, especially those from WWII. I have some models of WWII tanks on my desk and shelves (but not nearly as many as she has, I don't have time for making that many), in addition to the tanks from my Wh40k Imperial Guard regiment. Small arms don't interest me as much, but strategy and tactics for all types of military units do. I'll probably also cover the stuff you mentioned sometime in the future; Louise can't pretend to be dead indefinitely.

Han-Ko: Ironically enough, I've written the last few chapters quickly because I've been sick and havn't had anything better to do. I do hope I get better soon, though. Work stacks up when you're sick.

Narikthedemon: I doubt updates will be regularly this fast. I've just had a lot of spare time to kill as of late, as I've been sick.


	7. Chapter 7: And Home Before Dark

Hi! Nothing much happens this chapter, at least in the way of action.

I own nothing, neither Touhou or Familiar of Zero. They are owned by ZUN and Noboru Yamaguchi, respectively. I also don't own Into the Woods.

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**Newcastle, Albion**

Louise regained consciousness in darkness. She waited for her eyes to dilate and allow her to see, but it wouldn't go away. It must be her familiar.

She was lying on a bed; she could feel it beneath her. She must be back in Newcastle Castle. She could hear the freezing rain still pounding on the window pane.

Recollection of the last things she saw flashed through her mind: panic, Wardes's suicide, explosions, flying, blackness.

He was dead. He had blown himself up to breach the gate. The gate was breached. Had the town fallen? Was there fighting outside? Her familiar had probably saved her from the clutches of Reconquista just in time.

She tried to sit up, but there was a heavy weight on her chest. She moved her arm to push her familiar off her.

Rumia was instantly aroused by Louise's thoughts and floated up off of her master. She landed again next to the bed.

Louise sat up. Her head seemed to spin, even though she still couldn't see in the darkness.

She touched her head. Bandages. They were crusty with dried blood.

The water mages and commoner nurses hadn't been willing to approach the bed to change them while it was enveloped within Rumia's sphere of darkness.

She heard shouting in the halls of the castle.

"Familiar, has the town fallen? Will we be able to escape?"

"We won! The gate exploded, then their army came forward and marched in straight lines and didn't try to dodge my danmaku and I killed lots of them then the horse-riders rode out and attacked them from the sides with magic and they tried to defend but I flew over them and strafed them and they ran and the horsemen chased them down and killed them!"

"Slow down. What happened? We won?"

"Yes! When the gate exploded, the enemy attacked with all their men. They marched in straight lines and I shot lots of them with my danmaku. The people on the walls shot lots of them with arrows too. It was like a shooting gallery; they didn't try to dodge and just kept walking forward over all the bits of dead people."

"They launched another attack?"

"Yeah! While we were shooting them down, the horsemen rode out of the castle gates and attacked them from the side. The enemy broke up and began to run away, but I flew out to attack them and we killed them all!"

Louise wasn't sure what to think. She heard the tramp of soldiers as they marched through the streets outside and clamor in the halls from running servants.

"Familiar, dispel your darkness, I'd like to see for myself."

Rumia hesitated; then did as she was told. Louise was surprised by her familiar's sudden compliance; the youkai had been intractable when she had asked her to do the same thing back at the academy.

Rumia's mouth was smeared with blood from the people she had eaten earlier, but her clothing was perfectly clean. The little girl, who had practically lived her entire life in darkness, squinted her red eyes in the dim light of the magelights that illuminated the infirmary.

Louise could see that it was night outside. That explained Rumia's compliance; the youkai was more willing to show herself when in her domain of power.

She struggled to stand up out of the bed, and almost collapsed on the floor. She was weakened by blood loss, and the servants had not been willing to approach the ball of darkness to give her food. She caught herself on a bedpost.

"Familiar, help me walk. Don't shroud yourself."

Rumia hovered close to her master and landed, allowing Louise to put her arm around the Youkai of Darkness's shoulders and support herself.

The room was empty, no Royalist nobles had been wounded in the fighting and the wounded peasants were treated in the field hospital set up in the streets. She took a hesitant step forwards, leaning on her familiar.

Slowly, cautiously, she made her way out the door of the infirmary and into the hall. Peasant servants rushed by carrying platters of food. It made her hungry.

A guard walking the halls saw her and stopped.

"My ladies, where are you going? Do you require assistance?"

"To find the prince. I need to resolve some diplomatic matters."

"He's at the victory feast in the banquet hall, and will be free afterwards for a diplomatic meeting," he paused for a minute to consult a scrap of parchment, "Are you Lady Louise Francoise le Blanc de Valliere, by any chance?"

"Yes. That is I."

"In that case, he requested your presence at the victory feast. I was told to bring the Tristainian diplomat before the king when she regained consciousness. Do not worry, my lady, I believe he wishes to thank you for your assistance," he paused to look at Rumia, "I have no additional missing guests on the guest list. Who might you be?"

Before the Youkai could say anything herself, Louise declared, "She is my familiar. A night spirit."

"Very well. Please follow me."

The guard led them through the castle halls and along a covered walkway to the main dining hall, where the light of torches and sound of festivities filtered out of the door.

He announced their entrance to the assembled nobles in the hall: "My lords and ladies, Lady Louise Francoise la Blanc de la Valliere and her familiar, emissary of the kingdom of Tristain."

The assembled nobles all simultaneously turned their heads in response to the guard's announcement. Louise tried to bow, but had to quickly support herself on Rumia again before she fell over. She assumed she looked horrible, with the blood stained bandages wrapped around her head and clad in grey chain mail, as her dress had been removed because of damage it had sustained.

The king stood from his chair at the end of the table.

"I would like to personally thank the Tristanians and their queen for their generous support for our cause; without their contribution of food, supplies, and weaponry we would not have been able to rout and destroy this rebellion against my Brimir-sanctioned rule with such ease! So, from all the loyal and righteous nobles of the great nation of Albion, you, and all of Tristain, have my thanks."

His short statement made, he sat back down.

"Thank you sir, on behalf of Tristain, I am honored to accept your goodwill and thanks," Louise thought up a response on the fly.

Prince Wales stood up from his chair and walked over to help Louise. He offered her a seat at his side, and had another chair moved up for Rumia.

"You were the one who sounded the intruder alarm, am I right?"

"Yes. I encountered Jean-Jaques de Wardes, a traitor to the crown of Tristain, upon the wall in the night while awaiting my familiar."

"Without you, we wouldn't be sitting here, so thank you personally as well. I was worried you had died in the blast. It's a pity we weren't able to stop him from breaching the gate, but thanks to your warning, we were prepared. We hadn't expected another attack after we drove off their sappers. We were able to drive off the enemy and destroy him utterly."

"I helped!" Rumia added, "I shot lots of them!"

"A human familiar? I've never heard of such a thing before," Wales ignored Rumia's interjection, but changed the topic of conversation to the little girl seated next to Louise.

Rumia cringed at being called a human, but Louise responded before she could speak out.

"She isn't a human, she's a spirit."

"A spirit?"

"She's the spirit of the night. I fancy her to be the most powerful of spirits."

Wales was slightly confused. He knew that spirits usually were able to control their element to an extent, Albion had a considerable population of wind spirits corresponding to various high-altitude wind formations, but they only existed as manifestations of a specific magical element and were always tied to a natural feature that was related to that element.

Apart from a possible connection the Founder's Lost Element of the Void, "night" bore no relation to any of the traditional elements. Even that connection was shaky, the night was generally considered an absence of sunlight but it wasn't really an example of nothingness.

In addition, spirits, divine entities, rarely stooped low enough to deal with humans, and it was rarer still that one would suffer to be a mage's familiar.

"I've never heard of night spirits before. What exactly can she do?"

"I summoned her during my familiar summoning ritual. She is able to manipulate and shape darkness, and usually projects a sphere of night around herself. She also casts unusual magic and can fly."

It wasn't abnormal for spirits to use divine magic, leagues above that which humans could cast, nor was it abnormal for them to be able to manipulate their domain of power at will.

It took him a minute to put two and two together. There had been, without a doubt, a divine being upon the battlefield the previous day. The shrouded being in the gate had scythed down scores of enemy soldiers with a storm of magical projectiles and inspired the defenders to fight harder.

The magic had been truly unlike any magic previously displayed, even by spirits and elementals. Beams and orbs of raw magical energy were projected outwards from the shrouded figure in glowing patterns, helixes and straight streams, expanding spheres and targeted waves, sweeping beams and lattice networks.

"Your familiar was on the battlefield. She was critical to our victory. Thank you, to both you and your spirit familiar."

Rumia, detecting praise, turned and smiled at him and Louise, showing a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth and chewed up food. A serving tray of food had made it to her, and hadn't made it past her. The servant who carried it was trying to extract the tray of food from her grasp, without success. She went back to ripping off chunks of meat and stuffing them in her mouth as soon as the conversation moved on.

Louise noticed nobles scowling at the youkai's lack of noble etiquette, and quickly reprimanded her familiar.

"Familiar! Don't take everything, let the servant put some on your plate and eat that; others need to eat as well."

Rumia released the serving tray, allowing the servant to move on to serve Louise and Wales, and stuffed the chunks of food she had in her hands into her mouth.

Wales laughed.

"Spirit, have you ever been in the company of humans before?"

Rumia swallowed the mass of food in her mouth with an audible gulp.

"Yes! Humans are tasty! And Aya interviewed me once, and I've been to Reimu's shrine when she has gathering thingies after she fixes problems. And, if I wait around the Scarlet Devil Mansion gate, Sakuya will throw me the leftover meaty bits of them that Remilia doesn't drink!"

Instantly, the attention of all the nobles, and even the commoner servants, was focused on the youkai is a state of worry, suspicion, and fright. Louise was unperturbed by the comment yet ready to shut her familiar up at a moment's notice, but the same could not be said for the rest of those assembled.

"Umm… Spirit, you eat people?"

"Yeah? It's what youkai do! I eat humans who come into the woods! We aren't allowed to eat the ones in the human village; otherwise Reimu will beat us up. But anyone who comes into the forest in fair game if you can catch them. Humans are hard to catch. They are smart and can run away. I used hit trees when I chased them, because Reimu sealed me with the ribbon and made it so I couldn't see and took away my powers. But Louise broke the ribbon seal, with these!" She held up her hand, showing the runes that had been burned into it. "Now I can see, and I have my powers back!"

Instantly, both Louise and Rumia were bombarded by questions from the assembled lords, unsure if the creature before them was tame and safe of if they should be running for their lives or warning their families.

"Youkai? I thought you said she was a spirit?"

"Is she a threat to us?"

"Who is this Reimu person?

"Which human village are you referring too?"

Rumia and Louise responded to the hail of questions nearly simultaneously

"I'm Rumia, Youkai of the Darkness! Reimu is the Hakurei Shrine Maiden in Gensokyo, she beats up people who mess things up and makes things right again, and beats up youkai who go into the human village to eat the people. She gave us the spell cards to fight with so we don't kill each other. There's only one human village in Gensokyo, all the other humans live beyond the barrier. But sometimes the Gap Youkai drops in humans from outside for us to eat."

"The Princess of Tristain and I determined that 'youkai' most closely means 'spirit' in her language. We aren't sure if she originated in a far off land, or simply speaks an incomprehensible language of the spirits. She's never mentioned 'Reimu' or any human village before, so we aren't sure exactly where she was originally located before I summoned her at the Academy. Most likely, she never bothered to learn its name; spirits don't leave their place of power, but she may have had more room to explore than most because of her affiliation with the night. She's completely docile and subservient because of the runes; she won't attack anybody unless I let her. She's also perfectly capable of eating normal food."

Rumia fanned out her five spell cards out in her hands like a hand of 5-card poker, showing them to the nobles.

"These are my spell cards!" she continued, despite the nobles' apparent disinterest in what she had to say.

The assembled lords were slightly relieved to hear the spirit would not attack them, and the topic of conversation changed back to the logistics of retaking Albion.

The remainder of the meal passed uneventfully.

The storm cleared up midway through, the clouds temporarily parting to reveal a crystal ice covered landscape shining in the light of the stars. The city of Newcastle was coated in a thick layer of clear ice that made Louise temporarily forget that it was already spring. The burned-out husks of buildings and twisted, charred trees that were outside of the perimeter wall reflected the starlight eerily across the decimated plain of ice.

The ship back to the mainland elected to sail in the night, before a new storm could arise.

As Louise walked up the gangplank, leaning on her familiar, Prince Wales called out from behind her: "Wait! Hold the ship a minute!"

He walked up to Louise, and handed her a folded and sealed piece of parchment.

"Tell Henrietta that, if she will still have me, I will be waiting for her."

"Yes sir, I will," Louise replied, taking the parchment.

"Thank you."

The prince turned and hurried off back to his duties in the castle as Louise limped up aboard the ship, leaning on Rumia.

The ship lurched away from the dock and out into the night, Louise standing on its aft deck leaning on her familiar. Unloaded and with a tailwind, it was riding high and fast and, by morning, it had reached La-Rochelle.

**La-Rochelle**

Chainmail clinking as she was supported by her familiar, Louise debarked into the busy morning streets of the port city. A commoner's heavy wagon, carrying a load of long, flat crates, stopped and the driver signaled for her to board. Louise was too tired to care about maintaining her cover and trying to find a more dignified method of travel at the moment; Rumia picked her up set her on the driver's bench of the cart, next to the driver.

"I presume you are Lady Louise Francoise le Blanc de Valliere?" the driver asked, consulting a scrap of parchment she had.

Louise was surprised.

"Yes. How do you know my name, commoner?"

The driver produced a stack of papers.

"Michelle, First Lieutenant, Musketeer Corps, on orders from Captain Agnes de Milan. I was ordered to await your return and retrieve you. Our cover is a covert arms shipment to the Royalists disguised as food and clothing."

"So that's what is in the boxes? I'm in a hurry to meet Henrietta."

"Yes," she called out to a worker, "Dockhand! Get these crates unloaded and aboard that ship!"

Immediately, multiple ship workers leapt to action and began unloading the crates. The ship's XO approached the cart.

"Shipment of 20 coats, 10 pairs of boots, and 100 loaves of bread, correct?"

"Yes. That would be correct."

Michelle handed him a shipping manifest. He pried off the lids of one of the boxes and inspected its contents.

He shuffled some straw around and lifted out a long musket. He inspected the weapon and quickly laid it back in the case and covered it up with straw. With a mallet, he tapped back in the nails that held the top of the crate on, and a sailor grabbed it and carried it off to the ship.

"These supplies will be much appreciated."

"Good. Ensure they arrive safely."

The rest of the crates were unloaded from the wagon, and the trio set off.

"We're going to the palace, correct? I have important diplomatic information to give to the princess."

"No my lady. Her majesty will have left for your family's estate to attend your funeral by the time we arrive in Tristania. We are going directly to your estate."

"Okay. But hurry."

During the day, Louise rode beside Michelle on the driver's bench. At night, Louise slept in the wagon bed as it rumbled over the roads at breakneck speed. Thew whole time, Rumia sat in the wagon bed, shrouded in darkness, watching the countryside go by.

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Chaosrin: Glad you like it. I'm a fan of historical battle strategy and tactics, so that will show up. I used vaguely accurate seige warfare tactics, with adjustments of the contribution mages could provide. I'm not sure how fast I'm going to resolve the academy problem. She is going to do a Tom-Sawyer attend-your-own-funeral thing next chapter, though. Wardes is dead.

Krazyfanfiction1: Glad you like it.

Mordalfus Grea: Not even sure if Tiffania will show up yet.

Narikthedemon: I'm better. This is probably closer to my update pace, maybe a bit slower than usual because of a pile of backlogged work.

Guest: The initial ladder attack is called an escalade, and normally forms the opening of sieges. Not winning the escalade is not detrimental, because usually you settle in for the starve-them-out part of a siege if you don't win. Failing to capture the castle in the escalade is not a decisive defeat. It generally occured quickly, and was not neccessary to be won, in order to put the defender on the defensive. Afterwords, if they don't win, they usually offer the defender a chance to surrender before they shell them. The escalade was a favorable situation. However, the second attack was a "stupid move". I wanted to portray Reconquista as impatient and to move the story along, so they advanced the timetables. The second attack started in a favorable position, numbers wise, and would have overwhelmed the defenders if it wern't for the cavalry and Rumia, combined. I intended the second attack to sound like Pickett's Charge, as a "damn casualties, throw everything at it and lets finish this" attack. In short, a medieval general would have refused combat based on the weather alone, but this is Albion where I said weather was awful, so the escalade was a good idea, and the second attack had a high chance of success. If a siege general had the option to not lay siege, they took it as often as they could.

Han-Ko: I got better! But I did have a crapload of work.

Mizuki00: Yeah, I meant the GuP Yukari. I should have realized that there might be confusion, after all this is a Touhou crossover! Sorry on the deficiency of gore this chapter, there isn't any battle to be had (at least for a short time).

pltrgst: It is fast paced. I'm trying to keep chapters around 3k-4k words.

Arsonist: Probably. Didn't think about that. I just read Breaking in Rumia, because you pointed it out. Then, after I sorted through Spacebattles, it was posted here! (I find fanfic on Spacebattles hard to read because of the other posts between chapters.) I'm pretty sure I'm going somewhere else with my story.

Dyc: Glad you like it. I know a lot of random esoteric stuff that is useless in everyday life, it manifests itself here.

On a topic completely unrelated to Familiar of Zero or Touhou, I'm not a biggest fan of the Imperial Guard's new name (Astra Militarum), but I don't really mind. Its going to be one of Warhammer 40k's big, as the internet would say, "noob spotters", you'll be able to tell who play before 6th ed and who picked it up after 6th ed. Personally, I've been into Warhammer 40k for a long time (my old friend introduced me to it as the logical combination of my two pastimes, making model tanks and tactical wargaming, which are still my two pastimes many years later), but only started dropping the cash on models within the last two years (GW models are so expensive!), so to me, we'll always be the glorious Imperial Guard! I'll just have to get used to people calling me the Astra Militarum.


	8. Chapter 8: An Interrupted Funeral

Hi! This chapter is really short. It was originally at the end of the last one and the beginning of the next one, but I decided that was too long and wanderd around a bit much and would rather separate two chapters into three shorter chapters.

I own nothing, neither Touhou or Familiar of Zero. They are owned by ZUN and Noboru Yamaguchi, respectively. I also don't own _You Only Live Twice_ or _Tom Sawyer_ (but the latter may be so old it is in public domain).

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**De-Valliere Estate**

It was a week's trip to the De-Valliere Estate from La-Rochelle, but Michelle drove the wagon through night and day without rest. Three days later, the wagon rolled across the bridge over the river that served as one of the borders of the De-Valliere lands and soon rumbled through the gates into the manor ground.

The driver and animals were exhausted, and a guard quickly directed them to the stable and away from the grounds where the funeral was occurring.

"Is the mission accomplished?" The guard queried.

"Yes Captain. Here is Louise."

Louise attempted to dismount from the wagon without Rumia's help, but, between her yet to fully heal injuries and the shaking of the wagon for the past three days, she promptly collapsed on the ground. Rumia and Agnes caught her, and set her down in a chair in the stables.

"Can you walk?"

"With my familiar's help, yes."

"Good. We're moving you to your chambers; the princess will see you there for debriefing."

"Is there nobody around to notice us?" Michelle questioned.

"No. Everyone is out at the cemetery; they are reading eulogies and preparing to lower the coffin. You arrived just in time. I'll take her to her chamber, you notify the princess."

With Rumia's help, Agnes moved Louise into the manor by a side servant's entrance, and brought her up to her room. Louise was embarrassed at having to be guided through her own house, but she remained silent.

Louise leaned on Rumia's shoulder in the darkness; Agnes walked ahead and warned them of steps, doors, and when to turn, all the while casting nervous glances back at Rumia.

Rumia set Louise down in a chair in her bedroom, before sitting down in another chair herself. Agnes posted herself in the antechamber, ready to intercept anyone who attempted to enter the room, watching the door to the hallway and the inside of the bedroom simultaneously.

"Familiar, dispel your darkness, and help me up."

"It's bright out. I don't want to!"

"You were fine showing yourself to the Albionian nobles! You're coming with me, and don't like being in the darkness."

"It was nighttime then. The bright hurts my eyes."

"You'll get used to seeing in the light if you didn't have yourself shrouded all the time."

"Won't you get used to seeing in the dark?"

"No, your darkvision is a magical power only you have; I cannot see in your absolute darkness."

"But you can see what I see! I can feel it when you see what I see."

"That is only practical for observation. It is really hard to move and do things when like that. Just dispel your darkness sphere and help me over here."

Rumia sighed. She couldn't argue with her master. She made her ball of darkness disappear and stood to help Louise.

"I'm tired of sitting around. I'm going to watch my eulogies and find the princess."

"A what-o-gie?"

"A speech you give for dead people."

"But you aren't dead."

"Remember, I'm supposed to be. They think I'm dead because of a fire; that was my cover for leaving the academy and going to Albion."

"Oh yeah. Are people going to give me you-lo-gies too?"

"No. Nobody knows you, plus, you're my familiar."

"Oh."

"Agnes, we are going to watch my funeral. It's at the chapel, right?"

"Wait here for the princess to meet you for debriefing. You'll expose yourself if you go there."

"I've spend the last three days and nights sitting in your lieutenant's cart, and the days before that in a castle under siege! I am not going to sit here until tomorrow morning waiting for them to finish praying for me! Now, we'll be careful, you can come with us if you want, but I'm not sitting around here until after nightfall."

Agnes sighed.

"I have orders, from the princess, to guard you here and prevent the attendees from finding out you are alive. You will wait here."

"I don't care. The funeral will take at least through the night because the attendees are going to stand vigil in the chapel. Sometime around tomorrow afternoon they'll lower the coffin down, and I'm not waiting that long. I have urgent information to give to the princess, and I'd like to find out what people are saying about me. You can come with and watch us, but the guests will never see us."

Louise stood up from the chair, and almost fell over. The lacerations on her head may have mostly healed, but a bone fracture in her hip had not.

Rumia rushed over to help her stand and walk.

"Come on, Agnes."

Leaning on Rumia, but trying to stand and walk on her own, she walked around the Captain of the Musketeer Knights, who was trying to both block the door and watch the hall unnoticed, and into the hall.

The hall was deserted; everyone important was out at the funeral and the servants were busy preparing the evening meals for all the guests. Louise made her way down the hall, followed by Agnes, keeping a close watch on her and the surrounding conditions. Down the stairs to the ground floor on the mansion, out the side serving door, then out along the path through the gardens to the chapel they went, taking care not to be noticed by anybody.

The chapel on the De-Valliere estate was large enough to be a church of its own right, but not nearly as large as the cathedral in the nearby city. It was a freestanding building, attached to the family cemetery, within the perimeter wall of the estate itself but outside of the manor house.

The door had been left open, because it was hot inside the dark building in the heat of the afternoon sun. Louise crept inside the room, her eye quickly adjusted to the light difference.

The sides of the hall were lit with collections of candles in alcoves that flickered dimly in the dark light provided by the stained glass windows. There was a crowd lined up in the pews; Louise was surprised that so many people would attender her funeral. She spotted Kirche and Tabitha in the audience, as well as some of the academy professors, and some other family friends. Her own family was sitting behind a closed, empty coffin at the head of the hall.

There were enough ranks of pews to hold all the commoner servants that staffed the manor, but they were not present, and instead they were occupied by the guest nobles. When they attended services, her family was usually seated above the peasantry in a balcony at the back of the hall; she figured that was where she would find Henrietta and her retinue.

"Familiar, project your darkness so that it obscures us as we head to that staircase, but is still bright enough that we can see and doesn't draw attention to us," Louise whispered to Rumia.

Rumia re-projected her sphere of darkness and shaped it into a shrouded hallway heading for the staircase. In the dim candlelight of the hall, it was invisible behind the ranks of guests, and concealed Louise, Rumia, and Agnes within its darkness.

They carefully made their way to and up the stairs, making no sound that could be heard over the sound of a speaker droning on at the head of the hall.

Henrietta was sitting in her mother's seat in the balcony, surrounded by musketeer guards. The Musketeer Knights always formed the princess's royal bodyguard. They had been the knight order selected for this task, over the Dragon Knights, Manticore Knights, and Griffon Knights, because of their unique organization.

The 215-man strong company, composed of 5 platoons, each of 3 12-man squads and a 5-man headquarters, and a 10-man company HQ, was formed entirely out of female commoners. Every soldier was armed with sword and musket, and moved on foot. Because the unit was composed of well-trained commoners, the risk to the princess if they were to prove unreliable was minimal but they were still more than capable of fighting off threats to her.

Musketry's reload time made it ineffective at close range, the range they would have to fight at if they turned against the crown, but lethal at mid to long range combat, where it outranged most powerful magical attacks and could compensate for lack of accuracy with volume of fire. Their swordsmanship was more than capable of seeing off aggressors who had come closer than optimum musket range, but would be inadequate to fight against the princess's magical capability.

Louise found a lightweight chair and had Rumia move it to the far end of the hallway behind the balcony. The entrances to the balcony itself was guarded by musketeers, but Louise, assisted by Rumia, slunk through the shadows cast beneath the sills of the stained glass windows where the light contrast would make it difficult for the guards to spot them. Agnes walked through the guards and up behind Henrietta, and whispered in her ear. She then signaled to two of the musketeers, who quickly re-deployed to the bottom of the stairwell.

Agnes stuck her head into the hall behind the balcony, where Louise had set up her chair to watch the proceedings, and looked around for Louise. Knowing what to look for helped, and she returned to whisper to the princess.

Henrietta stood from her chair, taking care to be inconspicuous in doing so, and entered the hallway. Agnes pointed out to her where Louise was sitting, to Louise's surprise.

"Hi Louise! Hello youkai!" Henrietta whispered.

Rumia smiled at being acknowledged.

"Good afternoon, my princess."

"Stop calling me that. Call me Henrietta. I was worried you'd get stuck up there and killed for real. Now, did you succeed in your mission?"

"Yes, I did. I was trapped in Newcastle when Reconquista attacked. With the help of my familiar, we utterly defeated them. Currently the Royalists are retaking Albion. Prince Wales asked if you would still accept his hand is marriage, now that he had survived and is on the attack. Oh, by the way, did you get my message about Jean-Jacques de Wardes?"

"Oh good! That's wonderful news! And I did get your message; we have detained his family and seized his estate, but have been unable to capture him. All guards are ordered to watch for him and shoot on sight. Here, come out onto the balcony and sit with me; this is all dreadfully boring and depressing and I need someone to talk to."

"Wardes is dead. He was killed at the Siege of Newcastle. And won't someone see me?"

"Nah. We'll be fine."

Louise stood, with Rumia's help, and followed Henrietta out onto the balcony, taking her father's chair at Henrietta's side. Rumia sat down in a chair next to Louise, intended for the de-Valliere family's firstborn son, but because of the fact that the current Duke and Duchess de-Valliere had no male heirs, had been unoccupied since the wedding of Louise's parents.

"Are you still going to go ahead with the marriage to the Germanians?"

"If the Royalists are winning, then probably not. I'll postpone it and see what happens."

"Here. Prince Wales had this letter for you."

Louise handed Henrietta the letter. While Henrietta read the letter, Louise watched Kirche stand up to tell of her memories of the deceased. The Germanian looked vaguely nervous, standing up before Louise's coffin and telling about how it was hilarious when the deceased reacted to her taunts and pranks.

"Stupid Germanian. This almost might be a good enough revenge for everything I've endured from you," Louise thought to herself. She listened to what her longtime rival was saying about her.

"… then there was this time, it was hilarious, she was always so prudish and conservative, when I told one of the boys I'd be seeing that night that my room was her room, and he knocked on her door half dressed. You should've seen the look on her face, especially when he was like 'You aren't Kirche!' She slammed the door in his face, then came out with a whip from who knows where and chased him away before trying to break down my door to get me! I hope her soul will forgive me, and not become a ghost or something to haunt me for the rest of my life! …"

Kirche laughed at her own story and joke, which had obviously offended the sensibilities of the more conservative Tristanian nobles, and continued on.

"Hmm… I wonder If I could do that to her. That would be perfect retribution, to leave her continuously looking over her shoulder for my ghost!" Louise thought, and almost laughed at her own idea.

"Am I going to stay dead?" she interrupted Henrietta's reading of Wales's letter.

"Eh. Probably. It'll be a diplomatic incident if you turn back up alive, and it'll create a mess with the Grammont family. They've been combing the wreckage for any sign of Guiche, but haven't yet found any sign of the body. They're sure that he should have survived; he wouldn't have been stupid enough to go back into the fire. You're probably the only of the three who 'died' that made it out, there was a first year whose room was right beneath yours who was probably crushed when the floor collapsed, he wouldn't have made it back out if he ran in, but you managed to escape flying your familiar. No offense to his or his family, but I'm getting really tired of their pestering and insisting we search for him and devote all resources to finding Foquet because they thing he was kidnapped. If you show up alive, there will be so many questions in the court. We'll tell those who need to know that you aren't dead, they maybe you can move to the palace and be my agent or advisor or something."

"Agent? Like the man in one of Mr. Rinnosuke's tee-vee story thingies that has a black suit and goes and stops the bad guy who is trying to make the humans go to war by stealing their rocketships who pretends to be dead so nobody goes looking for him and sneaks into his base in the volcano with the army of ninjas where the bad guy with the white kitty launches who drops the people who don't kill the secret-agent man into the piranhafish pond launches his bad-guy rocketship-stealing rocketships from and blows up the base with his bullet-cigarette?" Rumia whispered excitedly across Louise.

"Um… I'm not sure what you mean, but I'm sure that isn't what she's going to do," Henrietta laughed quietly.

"Oh! Mr. Rinnosuke had this box with a screen from the outside human world, Yukari said it was a Tee-Vee for watching plays that had been recorded, so we could watch our favorite stories again and again, and needed electricity, so we attached it to Okuu's fusion thingy to make it work and Mr. Rinnosuke had a stack of little black boxes that fit in a slot in the tee-vee and showed different stories, and sometimes he lets us into his shop to watch things on it. One of the stories was about a secret-agent-man who saves the world from a bad guy trying to start a war between the humans by stealing rocketships by pretending to be dead; that isn't what secret agents do?"

Henrietta looked confused, "Yeah, I guess agents sort of do that, but that sounds like it was an embellished story. Agents usually try to sneak into other countries to find out what they are doing so that if we go to war we can win easily."

"We tried to determine where she was originally from. We aren't sure, but she knows some human village but not its name where there is a 'Harukei Shrine'. These must be spirit things, or magical devices from human civilization not in this region of the world," Louise commented.

"Oh. That's still cool!" Rumia decided, and went back to watching Kirche talk in front of the assembled mourners.

"You never did tell me your familiar's name last time we met, just that she was a Night Spirit and called herself the Youkai of Darkness."

"She calls herself Rumia. I usually just call her 'familiar'."

"You should treat your familiar better, especially because she is a spirit. A spirit bound to a human is exceedingly rare, and you risk angering the other spirits if you don't treat one of their kind with proper reverence."

Agnes, who had left their presence to oversee the guards, suddenly came running up the stairs.

"Your majesty," she bowed and partially collected herself, "two things of urgent matter. A Gallian assassin attacked the palace; the queen is dead, you are the new queen. Also, Josette d'Orleans has arrived in the capital as a defector from Gallia, with a declaration of war from the king and requesting asylum for her and her twin sister, Charlotte d'Orleans."

* * *

Dark0w1: Thanks! She was a little late, I presume.

Krazyfanfiction1: Thanks!

Arsonist: Thanks!

Tama Saga: Pretty rough.

Han-ko: Is this a lot of time? I have no regular update schedule, so I write when I have time. Thanks!

Mizuki00: Not exactly saying "I'M ALIVE!" but she hasn't gone completely unnoticed, either.

Kamijou Touma no baka: Thanks!

Edit: Pltrgst: Changed it just now. Better?

I tried my hand at Touhou 06 again, this time on normal mode. I made it up to Patchouli via judicious use of Master Spark and the shift key. Then I died, because there were no more bombs to use. I found Reimu's bombs were not nearly as effective at clearing away bullets as Marisa's. Patchouli's little turret-ward-summoning circle-sentry thingies are very very annoying.


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